For a liberal softie who loves his beef fry and a drinking Gandhian who wants global peace and also well-laid pavements, a war with China is a worrisome proposition. After the incessant sabre-rattling on the western border, we are now on an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff in the east. There is no doubt that China is creating new facts on the ground, as our columnist Manoj Joshi has brilliantly put it. By building roads and infrastructure on other people’s property, China is redrawing maps and redefining sovereignty. Once a road is done, the facts on the ground would be inalienably altered. It is a brilliant tactic, no doubt. But even a tiny nation like Bhutan wouldn’t want this tactic to go unchecked. The question is, now what?
China could be responding to the US endorsement of India’s boycott of its One Belt One Road initiative. The standoff could be a message to the US that India is not good enough to contain China. Every day the Global Times has a nasty piece on Indian weaknesses and Chinese superiority. And most of it sounds puerile. Is it a case of the world’s newest superpower refusing to accept India’s response and the troop build-up to safeguard a small country’s sovereignty? Surely, the daily dose of history from Beijing has a lot of hubris.
The Chinese loose talk on war also reflects nervousness, particularly when the navies of India, the US and Japan are about to have a joint exercise in the Indian Ocean Region. But when we look closer, the first to indulge in such causal commentary on war was the Indian army chief, Bipin Rawat. He was the one who talked about a war on two and a half fronts. The chief of the third largest army in the world ought to exercise more restraint. Being loud-mouthed is not exactly being combat-ready. We have no record of Sam Manekshaw shooting off his mouth before splitting Pakistan into two manageable pieces. In fact, that was an awesome two-front war.
To think about it, we have never had an all-out war. After the brutal British battles to build the empire, our cities were never sacked. The last time Delhi was destroyed was by the East India Company soldiers in 1857. All our wars as an independent nation were fought by our soldiers on far-flung borders in the east or the west or the north or in Sri Lanka. As citizens of a new nation, we have never experienced “the pity of war, the pity war distilled,” as Wilfred Owen terms it.
It is one thing to glorify a professional soldier dying while doing his job, wrapping him in the national flag and carrying his corpse on our shoulders shouting slogans, and quite another to see our cities, small towns, farms, factories and schools turn into a wasteland. No war is worth the misery, particularly with neighbours, because they always remain neighbours and every fresh layer of hostility will only add to bitterness that will last beyond generations. It is no surprise that the Chinese chose to remind us of 1962. Every war is a milestone in memory. I wish I would never have to experience a war or an earthquake or a riot.
But then, mushy sentimentalists do not conduct statecraft, diplomacy and war. We can only hope and pray that our hard-nosed politicians have read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, particularly while dealing with the Chinese. It says, the skilful leader subdues the enemy without fighting.
