On June 21, two Chinese military helicopters swooped low over Demchok, a tiny Indian hamlet high in the Hima-layas along the northwestern border with China. The helicopters dropped canned food over a barren expanse and then returned to bases in China. India's military scrambled helicopters to the scene but did not seem unduly alarmed. This sort of Cold War cat-and-mouse game has played out on the 4,057-kilometer India-China border for decades. But the incident fed a media frenzy about "the Chinese dragon." Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese incursions into India have dominated the 24-hour TV news networks and the newspaper headlines.
China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. And most of those claims are tangled up with Tibet. Large swaths of India's northern mountains were once part of Tibet. Other stretches belonged to semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Because Beijing now claims Tibet as part of China, it has by extension sought to claim parts of India that it sees as historically Tibetan, a claim that has become increasingly flammable in recent months.
Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled, and the situation has taken a dangerous turn. The emergence of videos showing Tibetans beating up Han Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities created immense domestic pressure on Beijing to crack down. The Communist Party leadership worries that agitation by Tibetans will only encourage unrest by the country's other ethnic minorities, such as Uighurs in Xinjiang or ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, threatening China's integrity as a nation. Susan Shirk, a former Clinton-administration official and expert on China, says that "in the past, Taiwan was the 'core issue of sovereignty,' as they call it, and Tibet was not very salient to the public." Now, says Shirk, Tibet is considered a "core issue of national sovereignty" on par with Taiwan.
The implications for India's security"”and the world's"”are ominous. It turns what was once an obscure argument over lines on a 1914 map and some barren, rocky peaks hardly worth fighting over into a flash point that could spark a war between two nuclear-armed neighbors. And that makes the India-China border dispute into an issue of concern to far more than just the two parties involved. The United States and Europe as well as the rest of Asia ought to take notice"”a conflict involving India and China could result in a nuclear exchange. And it could suck the West in"”either as an ally in the defense of Asian democracy, as in the case of Taiwan, or as a mediator trying to separate the two sides.
Beijing appears increasingly concerned about the safe haven India provides to the Dalai Lama and to tens of thousands of Tibetan exiles, including increasingly militant supporters of Tibetan independence. These younger Tibetans, many born outside Tibet, are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama's "middle way" approach"”a willingness to accept Chinese sovereignty in return for true autonomy"”and commitment to nonviolence. If these groups were to use India as a base for armed insurrection against China, as Tibetan exiles did throughout the 1960s, then China might retaliate against India. By force or demand, Beijing might also seek to gain possession of important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie in Indian territory close to the border. Both politically and culturally, these monasteries are seen as key nodes in the Tibetan resistance to Chinese authority.
Already Beijing has launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at undercutting Indian sovereignty over the areas China claims, particularly the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and one of its key cities, Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century and home to several important Tibetan monasteries. Tibet ceded Tawang and the area around it to British India in 1914. China has recently denied visas to the state's residents; lodged a formal complaint after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008; and tried to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India because some of the money was earmarked for an irrigation project in the state. All these moves are best understood in the context of China's recent troubles in Tibet, with Beijing increasingly concerned that any acceptance of the 1914 border will amount to an implicit acknowledgment that Tibet was once independent of China"”a serious blow to the legitimacy of China's control over the region and potentially other minority areas as well.
The reports of Chinese incursions can be read as a signal that it is deadly serious about its territorial claims. The exact border has never been mutually agreed on"”meaning one side's incursion is another side's routine patrol"”but the Chinese have clearly stepped up their activity along the frontier. The Indian military reported a record 270 Chinese border violations last year"”nearly double the figure from the year before and more than three times the number of incidents in 2006, says Brahma Chellaney, an expert in strategic studies at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research, an independent think tank. Noting that there was a reported incursion nearly every day this summer, Chellaney says this amounts to "a pattern of Chinese belligerence." In June the People's Daily criticized recent moves by India to strengthen its border defenses and declared: "China will not make any compromises in its border disputes with India." It asked if India had properly weighed "the consequences of a potential confrontation with China."
To many Indians, China is an expansionist power bent on thwarting India's rise as a serious challenge to Beijing's influence in Asia. They are haunted by memories of India's 1962 war with China, in which China launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier, routing the Indians before unilaterally halting at what today remains the de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). They are fearful of China's expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean, seeing its widening network of naval bases as a noose that could be used to strangle India. They blast Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for alleged weakness in the face of this growing threat. Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, predicted in a widely publicized essay this summer that China would attack India sometime before 2012. With social unrest rising within China due to the worldwide economic slump, he says, the leadership in Beijing needs "a small military victory" to unify the nation, and India is "a soft target," due to Singh's fecklessness. In recent weeks India's defense minister and the heads of the Army and Air Force have felt compelled to reassure the public that "there will be no repeat of 1962."
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"They are haunted by memories of India's 1962 war with China, in which China launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier"Terribl inaccurate. India invaded China in 1962.Neville Maxwell, the Times of London journalist in India at the time of war, wrote the best study of the event. Anyone who would like to read an independent evaluation of the Indian invasion should read his account:http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/oct/08max1.htmThe article summary:"Indians will be shocked to discover that, when China crushed India in 1962, the fault lay at India, or more specifically, at Jawaharlal Nehru and his clique's doorsteps. It was a hopelessly ill-prepared Indian Army that provoked China on orders emanating from Delhi, and paid the price for its misadventure in men, money and national humiliation." - Rediff, main Indian web portal
Lets see now...Quote "Large swaths of India's northern mountains were once part of Tibet".The United States recognise Tibet as part of China, so does the European Union, so does India, Russia, Japan. So does the United Nations.So Indian occupying large swaths of historical Tibetan land which everyone recognises is part of China is somehow China's fault?What kind of warped logic is that?Kick the Indian Invaders out.
"Stories about Chinese incursions into India", Which incursions?Report 1: Chinese troops entered into the Indian territory near Mount Gya, and painted the word ???China??? in Cantonese on the rocks with red spray paint. [ How can you paint a word in Cantonese? Can you paint 'USA' in New York accent? Anyway, according to Indian media, India External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna 'plays down' the report and said: ???This is one of the peaceful boundaries. We have no dispute with China in this area.". Go figure. ]Report 2: Two Chinese military helicopters violated the Indian air space. [ It's denied by India???s Ambassador to China, S. Jaishankar. He called it 'groundless'. ]Report 3: PLA fired and injured two Indo-Tibetan Border Police soldiers. [ The India Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement: ???A media report about two ITBP jawans having been injured due to firing from across the Line of Actual Control has come to notice. The report is factually incorrect.??? ]For more details read BBC's report "China bashing in the Indian media"By Amit BaruahEditor, BBC HindiIt's the silly season in India-China relations. If you've tuned into one of the more hawkish Indian television channels or are reading the views of the many experts on India and China, it might seem like the two countries are at each other's throats.There has been a spate of denials from the Indian foreign ministry, the border guards and even the Indian air force. All insist that there have been no clashes and no violations of Indian air space. ...
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