How Galwan galvanised India and the world

Story by  ATV | Posted by  Aasha Khosa • 2 Years ago
Indian army convoy on way to Galwan
Indian army convoy on way to Galwan

 

 Deepak Vohra

Since the Chinese are obsessed with anniversaries, I suggest that both nations observe 15 June as National Realization Day.

We realized once again that Communist China could never be trusted, China realized that modern India is no pushover.

As someone bereaved in 1962, this is personally poignant for me.

The Galwan intrusion was the stupidest self-goal by China since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

Pakistan’s 1999 Kargil misadventure was another example of a nation kicking the ball into its own goal.

Petty minds believe in deceit and denial. China took eight months to acknowledge its casualties (Mao took over 15 years to acknowledge his losses in the 1962 war), Pakistan even longer to confess that its army was involved.

Bad governments always lie because the truth requires honour and courage.

Both episodes would enrich Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 classic “The March of Folly” about how stupid government’s act against their own interests.

Nations must discover their truth and come to terms with it.

The Galwan clash was a climacteric for both nations, with four preeminent outcomes.

1) It exposed the PLA as a cowardly stuffed paper dragon that seeks to intimidate through a show of force rather than the application of that force.

2) It aroused India’s pride and reinforced our comprehensive national willpower with an all-of-people approach to national security.

3) It showed the world that China’s so-called “assertiveness” is actually naked aggression.

4) It trashed China’s global image.

The role of our security apparatus is exemplary, with the outstanding National Security Advisor Ajit Doval personally networking globally and calling in his IOUs to expose China.

More and more people believe that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon; Tibet and Xinjiang, all but forgotten, are back in focus (there is a Bill in the US Congress to recognize Tibet as an independent country); several western Parliaments (including the European Parliament) have condemned the genocide against the Uighurs; Chinese academics and students are commonly suspected of pilfering knowhow; Chinese-looking people in western cities are abused; Chinese investments are rejected; the Bilk and Rob Initiative is deader than the Dodo with the G7 offering a transparent alternative; America and Europe have kissed and made up to confront China; Russia wants to distance itself from China; and the China-EU trade and investment deal is frozen.

Why did China do Galwan?

Much of Chinese impressions about India were formed through translations of British colonial literature which was crudely racist in its depiction of India.

These mediated perceptions have remained entrenched in Chinese attitudes and history was rewritten to fit preconceived notions about an adversary’s character, such as the Chinese conviction that in 1962 the Indian army simply ran away.

One post-Galwan article called Indians “big time thieves.”

While India’s past glory as a great civilisation is occasionally conceded, China sees India as a failed and fallen country, owing to the slavish character of its people and the lack of a strong central political authority to mobilise the people against aggression.

Even the spread of Buddhism in China from India is regarded as a baneful external influence which must be thoroughly exorcised to allow the true Chinese spirit to emerge.

A Chinese academic delegation that visited India in 1984 was on its way to Bodh Gaya, when their car stopped as angry demonstrators were blocking the road.

This, the delegation leader said, was unthinkable in China. The authority of the state was indispensable to political stability. He did not understand that complex societies like India's are not amenable to coercive direction.

Chanakya had said there are only two types of neighbours, vassal states or enemies, this is how China regards its neighbourhood.

We cannot be friends with them because they think we are racially and culturally inferior.

During the 1988 visit of late PM Rajiv Gandhi, India yielded to China’s gentle 'pressure' to put the border issue on the back-burner, while expanding the relationship in all other areas.

China was thrilled.

It never changed its behaviour – never refraining from protecting Pak terrorists in the UN or advancing specious pleas against India’s case for permanent UNSC membership or desisting from arming Pakistan or blocking India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.

In the 2017 Doklam standoff, China live-fired its big guns to frighten India. The Communist mouthpiece threatened to strip the Indian army to their underwear.

We will not do likewise because the Chinese need their underwear to make masks for Pakistan or to hide Indian SIM cards.

China worries that India might again become the platform, like in the past, for an assault on China and hence needs to be neutralized.

After Galwan, India quickly hit back militarily, economically, culturally at China: we bought new weapons, banned several Chinese apps, curtailed imports from China, shut out Chinese from bidding for road contracts, increased scrutiny of Chinese investments in many sectors, and kept out Chinese companies from 5G trials. The economic impact of these measures on China may be low, but the psychological impact will be high as many other nations sanction China. Through its so-called salami slicing, China may have gained a bit of pork, but it awakened India’s comprehensive national will power.

Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said 200 years ago “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”

The world is now awake, and China is trembling.

Lord Xi Jinping, already roiling the Communist Party with a "rectification" campaign and mass persecution of foes, sought to divert attention from his domestic woes with the high-profile incursions into India.

Thinking that Indian leaders and soldiers, "psychologically paralyzed" by the trauma of the 1962 conflict, would play only defense, he was shocked when India pummeled the “mighty” PLA.

If China had attacked us in Ladakh but behaved itself in the South China Sea, the world would scarcely have noticed.

Its aggressiveness in the sea is invariably juxtaposed with the attack in Ladakh.

The Quad, a nebulous concept that emerged during the 2004 tsunami with four navies coordinating their relief operations, has acquired renewed vigour.

As the law of unintended consequences kicks in, the world comes together in a partnership against China’s aggression.

Ping Pong is praised for every real or imagined Chinese triumph. But he could as easily be blamed for things that fall apart. When will dictators learn that praise and condemnation are but two sides of the same coin?

Settlement of outstanding issues with India will overturn China’s fixation to curb our power (so they do not even define their territorial claims, hoping to keep nibbling away) and seriously complicate the Pakistan-China relationship.

It would also mean respecting India’s political, economic and security in its periphery, which will, in turn, mean two tigers on the same mountain.

India’s use of the Tibetans in capturing the heights on the southern Pangong Tso is an uncomfortable political signal to China.

Despite its impressive high-tech arsenal, the PLA must deal with an obsolete command system, rampant corruption, and poor training. Its military doctrine has not evolved beyond human wave tactics. Historically, the Chinese are no fighters. That is why an imaginary fellow called Sun Tzu talked about winning a war without fighting, akin to making money without working! Xi keeps lamenting this, afraid that this troops will huff and puff and blow their own house in. He asks his soldiers to be learn how to fight at a moment’s notice, to be absolutely pure, reliable and loyal and Prime Minister Le Keqiang says the Communist Party’s goal is to strengthen the political loyalty of the PLA.

What is going on?

India gave immediate state funerals to its 20 Galwan bravehearts who died for India.

Ping-Pong’s boasts about the supreme power of China has engendered a growing hubris about China’s self-perception as the main driver of global development and an indispensable factor in world peace and  prosperity, even claiming it as  “the only splendid civilization in  human history with an uninterrupted record of more than five thousand years” (it used to be 3,000 till a former Chinese leader visiting Egypt was told that the pyramids were built 5,000 years ago and promptly extended China’s antiquity by 2,000 years).

A famous Professor once highlighted the vulnerability of China to the bad-emperor syndrome. There were some golden periods in Chinese history, but many more of terrible emperors – the latest being right now.

One of the most infamous was Zhou You Wang (Gongsheng), 8th century BCE, who, to humour his mistress, would repeatedly call out his armies to face a non-existent invader. When the invaders did come, he was slaughtered.

The foolish emperor playing with military matters is an enduring Chinese lesson on responsibility.

Xi Jinping is like the Red Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, egotistic, megalomaniac, narcissistic, with a deep need for excessive adulation, and frequent commands of “off with his head”. I do not know what you mean by your way, the Queen rebukes someone, all the ways about here belong to me.

Mao’s soldiers were far tougher, more hardened and committed than the present PLA fellows are effeminate “princelings” (the Goebbels Times lamented the loss of masculinity among young Chinese males), who come from an environment of materialistic "capitalistic greed", combined with a rigid and corrupt one-party system, and rely on modern science and technology including cyber warfare to intimidate and overwhelm their neighbours.

The family of former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao reportedly had assets amounting to around $ 2 billion.

China’s economic growth has generated the so-called “wealth effect” that has had serious deleterious effects on the armies of Europe, Japan (and even the US) rendering their citizens generally war averse. Because of our huge population India is able to recruit comfortably for our all-volunteer army and multiple paramilitary forces. On the ground our ITBP and the Special Frontier Force have shown that they can best the Chinese. They specialize in quiet professional killing, demoralizing the enemy as the Vietcong did to the well-fed American GIs.

The PLA has more military hardware and money than we do, but the average Chinese soldier has nowhere near the courage, capability, competence, and conviction of his Indian counterpart. He does not have the same zeal in defending his motherland as our jawans, NCOs and JCOs have.

The Chinese soldier is merely a slave of an authoritarian system which dares not even give him a decent public burial for fear of losing face but orders him to face the battle-hardened Indian military, of the best soldiers in the world?

China’s one child system has created conditions where each body bag means two grieving parents and four grieving grandparents with no progeny left to make offerings to the ancestors or to sweep their tombs at the annual Qingming Festival.

Comparatively speaking, the Chinese soldiers are mere chaff, not even good enough for riot control.

China is racing against time to maintain ideological coherence, moral legitimacy, and self-renewal. Chinese people are in a coerced stupor and have surrendered the ability to think. This is Xi’s version of George Orwell’s 1984.

China is bracing for difficult years. In July 2020, Xitler warned his people that the “international environment grows ever more complex, and instability and uncertainty have clearly increased.”

I see several things happening soon:

1) Prolonged period (up to 5 years) of economic pain for the world as it seeks to decouple from China

2) No more country as single factory of the world

3) Increased focus on robotization in manufacturing to curb costs

4) The international financial system will metastasize into a more acceptable paradigm

5) The Belt and Road Initiative will disappear

6) Democracy will rear its ugly (to the Chinese Government) head

7) The Chinese Communist Party will fade into irrelevance

8) Tibet and Xinjiang will fight for independence

9) The United Nations will wither away to be replaced by a new more representative international configuration

No one trusts the Communist Party of China, not even its own people, as the latest Edelman Trust barometer shows.

The world realizes the eternal wisdom of Kautilya in his 2,300-year-old Arthashastra: One should not trust the sweet words of evil people, because they do not forget their original nature.

(Deepak Vohra is a senior diplomat, special Advisor to Prime Minister on Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil)