Continuity, Economy & Militarism: New Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga Of Japan's Plate Is Full 

Continuity, Economy & Militarism: New Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan’s Plate Is Full

On ailing but long-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation, earlier this month, Japan’s Conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP), elected his Chief Cabinet Secretary as Party leader.

Most of the LDP factions united to give Suga a 70% majority on September 14^th.  Two days later, Yoshihide Suga was elected prime minister by Japan’s Diet.

 71 year old Suga has, in recognition of the support he has received, swiftly reappointed most of the heavyweights in Shinzo Abe’s outgoing cabinet.  However, a new face is attracting both interest and attention. It is Shinzo Abe’s younger brother Nobuo Kishi, appointed defence minister.

The Abe cabinet’s defence minister, Taro Kano, also a former foreign minister, was shifted to Administrative Reforms.

With increased Chinese and North Korean belligerence on Japan’s doorstep,  Shinzo Abe was already building a consensus on whether Japan should militarise more sharply. In fact, Japan has been steadily improving its indigenous armaments industry under Abe.  

Now Kishi, though new to the defence arena, will take the agenda forward. In a pointedly pacifist Japan post WWII, it was only allowed a token military capacity. Japan has been long dependent on American military protection, including its nuclear weapons umbrella. This protection applies to Taiwan in the region as well.

But giving the vastly altered political, economic and military landscape in 2020, the time has come to accelerate Japan’s own military preparedness in the face of an ever growing Chinese military.  

 Japan, like Taiwan, recognises it needs a much improved and bigger offensive capacity in the event of war. It must vastly upgrade its Army, Navy and Air Force. It needs weapons that can strike missile launch sites in North Korea and China.

That Shinzo Abe signed a treaty with India for mutual access to each other’s military facilities just days before handing over the baton is indicative. Suga and Kishi are likely to take matters forward.

 As the world’s third largest, Japan’s economy, already long in recession, plagued by indebtedness,  an ageing population, labour shortages, is now in distress. The Covid-19 pandemic has damaged the Japanese economy further. For Suga, as he has already indicated, economic issues will take centre stage. He wants to move sharply on greater digitisation for example.

There is the difficult question on when to hold the Tokyo Olympics, expected to be a substantial revenue earner, but postponed for a year by the pandemic already.

Economic issues may also become crucial in order to win the next elections. This even though the Japanese opposition is in fair disarray.

A number of Japanese manufacturers are being assisted financially by the Japanese government to move out of China. They will relocate, to India, and other countries. Japan enjoys a very good relationship with Vietnam also.

Taro Aso, a former prime minister was retained by Suga as the finance minister, as was Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan’s seniormost diplomat, as foreign minister. Suga himself has travelled very little outside Japan, though he has been successful at developing tourism to Japan.

Overall, Yoshihide Suga is credited with being an excellent administrator. He was virtually Abe’s shadow prime minister. Suga has risen to the top job in Japanese politics despite having no family background in it. He is the son of a strawberry farmer from Akita Prefecture. Suga is certainly no political blueblood like his mentor Shinzo Abe. But this may work well for him and the LDP with the every-man on the street.  

This change of guard in Japan comes at a critical juncture for India and its place in the world.  Its nearly five month old military and economic confrontation with China promises to be a game-changer. It is qualitatively different from the policy positions India has taken in the past. This time, India is pushing back against Chinese imperialism in no uncertain terms. The outcome,  is thought by many learned observers, as likely to go in India’s favour. This, if an armed conflict, even a two-front war breaks out, involving both China and its ally Pakistan.  India is battle hardened with professional soldiers, and China is practically untested and has a largely conscripted military low on morale and ability.

The way the world is looking at this stand-off is already significant. Even before it has come to war, it is already impacting strategic calculations. The ground is shifting in South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, West Asia, South-East Asia and the Asia-Pacific. That India is standing up to Chinese bullying without flinching is an inspiration to many other countries.  

It is also germane to the US and NATO alliance and its notions of geo-politics in the region, the Indo-Russian relationship, the emerging Quad Nations of Japan, the US, Australia and India. It has intensified the developing relationship with Israel and the Gulf countries of West Asia. They too are overcoming old dogmas and forging historical ties never seen before. China may be with Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, but is it working for them?

China is in truth on the backfoot. This is of course, not just because of India. Japan is watching closely. The freedom of the seas and its sea lanes in the South China Sea, the safety of the Japanese islands in the East China Sea, affect Japan - but others in the region as well.  South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, The Philippines, Indonesia, are all being intimidated by China as well.

Several countries are reeling from the debt traps they have walked into with the Chinese, including Cambodia and Sri Lanka, and of course, Pakistan. Others, like Bangladesh and Myanmar are teetering on the brink.

China’s sharp trade practices, including dumping of goods at vastly reduced prices to cripple competition and industry from elsewhere, is also now being challenged with boycotts and sanctions.

All this flux for China could well present huge economic opportunity for Japan, as more and more countries turn away from predatory China following India’s lead.

Suga may well see in an economic boom for Japan if he plays his cards right. That the pushback to China is backed by the Western powers provides an excellent backstop.

The relationship with India, is ripe for improving to the next level. It has been warming up ever since the arrival of the Modi administration in 2014 and the personal chemistry between Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi. Now,  if both countries strike while the iron is hot, it could assume stellar proportions.

(1,059 words)

September 17^th,2020

For: WIONEWS

Gautam Mukherjee

 Splittism Is The Nightmare Of The Red Emperor

Splittism Is The Nightmare of the Red Emperor

Splittism is a term used by President Xi Jinping. Most recently, he applied it to Tibet, pointing at its religious, political and cultural dissidence. His ire is directed at the glue of Buddhism there. He has vowed to turn Tibet into a Han fortress.

Of late, the off-balance “Red Emperor”, plagued by many devils, deals mostly in threats and insults. His “Might is Right” playbook is being roundly challenged everywhere, and he has been reacting boorishly.

 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has not been able to stamp out the spirit of Tibetan freedom in all the time since it was overrun in 1950. This despite the Tibetans being more or less unarmed.

Perhaps the need for a fresh bout of repression has become urgent now because of unexpected Indian resistance. India now refuses to cede any more surreptitiously grabbed territory, and has demonstrated some intent to get back a lot of it lost to China since 1962.

India has pointedly spearheaded its military tactics along with a Tibetan commando force made up from Tibetan exiles. A Tibetan government in exile also watches and waits in India along with the ousted Dalai Lama.

Recently a Buddhist monastery was demolished in Eastern Tibet. Earlier, Tibetan Prayer Flags were routinely pulled down. Monks have been roughed up and sometimes killed. Tibetans have been urged to be grateful for the benefits of development brought by China. They are expected to integrate with the Han majority.

Xi Jinping likes to trample on cultural, political and religious identity. And not just those of the Buddhists, Christians and Muslims located in China. He expects to break resistance this way. Recently he aimed some of his venom at India too.

Shortly after India upgraded a road to the LaC to make it easier for Hindu pilgrims to visit Kailash Mansarovar and Kailash Parbat, China chose to site missiles and a military base at the foot of Mount Kailash. A place regarded by Hindus as the sacred abode of Lord Shiva.

Splittism is now plaguing a faltering China on every side. President Xi Jinping is fighting multiple challenges to his sway in the CCP. One powerful challenger in the heart of the CCP, is Premier Li Keqiang. Increasing information flow has blown the lid off the power struggle. There have been a series of leaks to the media on different aspects of the ravaged Chinese economy, normally kept well hidden from the world. Li Keqiang has been raising concerns about the plight of millions of the Chinese poor, with suggestions, facts and figures. Bad Debt laden Chinese banks are struggling to survive. Factories are closed. There are publicly acknowledged food shortages. Floods, pestilence, the recent pandemic from Wuhan, have all taken their toll.

Retired military brass have also weighed in. One of them, an Airforce retired Major General Qiao Liang, in his book called Unrestricted Warfare  first suggested the development of a deadly virus that is then exported to the world. President Xi seems to have implemented this idea, with disastrous consequences not only for the world, but China itself.

But lately, the retired generals, Liang and Dai Xu in particular, want Xi to change course. They want him to stop the aggression on the borders with India, against Taiwan and other targets. They feel China is stretching military resources too thin by opening so many fronts simultaneously. It is also unifying the opposition to China.

But a roll-back would mean loss of face for Xi Jinping. He seems unwilling to show weakness though he seems frustrated enough. But others, such as the Defence Minister and the Foreign Minister seem highly stressed.

In counterpoint to all the splittism, Xi Jinping has ramped up his favourite weapon of an anti-corruption drive. This campaign, a favourite device, tends to wax and wane. It is a thinly veiled purging mechanism. It gets rid of Communist functionaries that are opposed to Xi in the name of action against corruption. Dozens have been removed from office, particularly in troubled Xinjiang.. The other side of the coin has Xi Jinping and his family, along with others close to him, involved in massive accumulation of offshore wealth.  As much as $ 4 trillion has allegedly found its way out of China and into secret accounts abroad.

On splittism there is no mercy. Christian churches are demolished and Bibles burnt. Inner Mongolians are told to forget their native tongue and learn Mandarin. Uighurs in Xinjiang are put in detention camps for re-education. Mosques are razed and Korans shredded. Beards are banned, along with Muslim worship. Han minders are sent to cohabit with Uighur women while their men are being re-educated. 

 In Hong Kong the protests are much more visible to the outside world. Xi Jinping sees them as unpatriotic and infected by British taught democratic aspirations. The crackdown there is equally brutal even as other countries pile up the economic  boycotts and sanctions on China.

Military posturing to conquer Taiwan and occupy the South China Sea have brought the United States military into the arena. The East China Sea is being patrolled by Japan. Other navies and airforces - Australian, Indian, French, Russian, are watching the Indian Ocean, the Malacca Straits, the South China Sea, and everywhere else there is a Chinese presence.  

The spectre of splittism haunts all dictatorships of the Left and Right.  However, it is the only perceived remedy to the extreme concentration of power. Apart, that is, from regime change. Stalin must have had his own one word Cossack moniker for the phenomenon. It has always brought on humungous purges and drawn torrents of blood. But it is a recurring suspicion, and doesn’t quite feel assuaged no matter how many, or how hard, it strikes.

 It even finds prominence in democracies, in those pockets that are electorally captured by despotic political parties and ruled by a single person and his or her family. Sometimes this lack of inner party democracy leads to change, just as in a dictatorship.

In the beleaguered Indian State of West Bengal, for a half century under the lash of Communist and populist but parochial, chauvinist rule already, splittism has surfaced. It is not enough to call it anti-incumbency, because the ruling Trinamool Congress is now being ripped apart from within. This is very significant, given that it sends 42 members to parliament, and West Bengal has a 294 member assembly.  

Political strategist Prashant Kishor and his firm Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), has found trouble brewing. The assessment was done between March and August 2020, even as the Covid 19 pandemic rages on. This year, Cylone Amphan has also devastated Kolkata and parts of West Bengal.

I-PAC conducted three separate surveys, a month apart, across the 294 Assembly constituencies in the state. What was looking like 110 sure seats in TMC’s kitty in March, plummeted to 78 in August. In 2016, TMC won 211 seats. The one past the half-way mark in the West Bengal Assembly is 148.

I-PAC and Prashant Kishor have made battle plans to remedy the situation before the elections scheduled of April-May 2021. But can it stem the rot?

Is this unhappiness in constituencies over the handling of Covid-19 and the cyclone? Or, has it come about gradually,  only catalysed by recent events? Is it weariness over the corruption, anarchy, high-handedness, lawlessness? The TMC cannot tolerate  criticism from anyone in the Party, or indeed within the state. The Centre is demonised, defied, and projected as the predatory “outsider”. A sense of localised victimhood  is encouraged.

Once more, the prospect of the fall, if it comes, will be engineered as much from within the TMC, as without, by the opposition BJP.

There are other spectacles of splittism. One playing out, is at the heart of the Congress Party.

Splittism is almost always brought on by a slippage in the power equation. That it should happen in an absence of political power is almost inevitable. But while a government is still in the saddle, splittism owes its onset to growing deficits and contradictions that cannot be quelled by sheer repression. An inner coterie can no longer control the tides of dissent. Sometimes it is a consequence of biting off more than one can chew. But this is seen only by others. It all takes some time to play out.  But splittism invariably portends the beginning of the end.  

(1,398 words)

September 10^th, 2020

For: The Sunday Guardian

Gautam Mukherjee

 India Is Now Working To Free Tibet

India Is Now Working To Free Tibet

The liberation of Tibet 2020 has claimed its first martyr, a 51 year old Company Leader, Nyima Tenzin, of the Special Frontier Force (SFF). Founded in 1962, the SSF is a special commando group of Tibetans in exile,   integrated with, and working alongside the Indian Army.

Tenzin, a father of three, died, some reports say, after stepping on a Chinese landmine planted under the snow, not now, but back in 1962. Other reports state he was shot in the neck by the Chinese. His funeral, with full military honours will take place today on the 7^th of September. His body was draped in both the Indian flag and the flag of free Tibet.

 This death, and the outflanking of the entire LaC issue it symbolises, is the new strategic landscape in Ladakh. 

India has revamped its military posture. The Rubicon has been crossed politically. By going up well behind the LaC, over 4 km deep, capturing the territory and features in between, India has turned the tables. The Chinese now have to contend with a proactive India that has abandoned its defensive game.

India now controls as many as 39 of the high points along the Pangong Tso. These give India oversight and military advantages all along the Pangong Tso, South to North. There is line of vision in other strategic directions as well.  

These heights, connected valleys, roads, and passes, have not been captured in a token sense, for the purposes of exerting pressure on the ongoing negotiations. They are designed to effect a military domination of the theatre of confrontation and are to be seen as a signature to a new policy.

The initial capture of the heights began on 29-30 August, after a Chinese attempt to unilaterally alter the status quo on the South bank of the Pangong Tso. It was reinforced with heavy armoured vehicles, tanks and missiles, some of it in place within hours. These took up position in the valley overlooking both Pangong Tso and Chushul.

This rapid deployment has taken away the initiative from the PLA and the Chinese leadership in the CCP back in Beijing. Four months after the latest Chinese intrusions began in May, the ground situation has been radically altered.

All Chinese positions after the intrusions, and even in the massed areas behind the front lines have been rendered vulnerable. In fact, the recapture of territory lost in 1962 has begun.

India is no longer acting for a restoration of the status quo as it was in April 2020. There will be no Indian pullback, no giving back of captured territory. The changed scenario has put the focus on the reclamation of over 1,000 sq.km in Ladakh encroached upon since the late 1950s.

By using the SSF as the spearhead, India is gaining from its legendary ferocity, prowess, its considerable knowledge of the terrain, and ability to fight at elevated heights in extreme conditions.

Underlining the new thrust which has cut through the stalled talks, is a bid to free Tibet and undo a historical wrong from the 1950s.

India has always had a peaceful Indo-Tibetan border for centuries. And the disruption, destruction, murder and humiliation wrought by Chairman Mao’s China will have to be obliterated if India is to see peace along its northern borders once more.

India has begun a process that apparently has the full diplomatic backing of the United States. This, given the bellicose stand taken by President Xi Jinping with multiple countries simultaneously, in the region, and the world. Both The NATO allies and the EU are now clear they will have to resist Chinese imperialism.

Meanwhile President Xi Jinping has unleashed a new wave of repression in Tibet as China fears a groundswell of rebellion.

India will have to free the occupied territories in Siachen, Akshai Chin and Ladakh first. And this is the face of hysterical threats from the Chinese.

But India’s priorities have changed beyond going back and forth on an undefined LaC. China is fond of citing obscure historical and cultural precedents, even as it refuses to honour treaties or recognise any of the older or colonial era protocols.

India has now moved on. It has decided not to engage with ever changing Chinese maps of the LaC region, all 4,000 km or so of it. The Chinese, on their part, think the LaC is only 2,500 km. long, because they claim Arunachal Pradesh as theirs, calling it South Tibet.

China has also advanced unsustainable claims in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and the Sikkim/Bhutan  areas. These have become ever more aggressive over the years, and made a mockery of negotiations at all levels of interaction. In addition, China is playing a predatory role in PoK , Gilgit-Baltistan directly, and via Pakistan as well.

India has no choice but to outflank existing Chinese strategies and tactics. To place China on the mat the best course is to put Tibet, captured by Red China as recently as the 1950s, back into contention.

This will no doubt see India foraying across the LaC regularly, and at various points along it, to create military advantages and pursue the broader objective. Every excursion will hopefully result in gain of territory that will not be returned to China.

All this cannot happen without a fight or perhaps many skirmishes to come. But China is already aware, judging by its agitation at its Defence Minister level, that it is a battle ignited out on the fringes of its empire that it will find hard to sustain and win. The hostile Tibetans, armed and trained by India and its allies, will do everything to help themselves.

It could turn into a debacle for China going forward, no less humiliating than the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan. Certainly, the dragon is not likely to see a day’s rest from now onwards.

(971 words)

September 7^th, 2020

For: WIONEWS

Gautam Mukherjee

 Into The Maw Of The Furnace With It If Its Fine Steel We're After

Into The Maw Of The Furnace With It If Its Fine Steel We’re After

It is true that things are in flux. It is difficult to get up off the ground. India and the world are trying to shake off the stupor that comes after a bone-jarring fall. There is a viral, contagious pandemic that has claimed almost a million victims around the globe, and still, after nearly a year, it rages on.

Vaccines are still under preparation in many countries. Vaccines that one can only hope will work in the face of a constantly mutating Covid-19. Even when one recovers there are long term ravages to contend with.

Almost every country, brought to a standstill with partially effective lockdowns, is in recession. But one belligerent country where the Covid-19 originated and proliferated first is responsible for spreading it internationally.

It is now persona non grata as a consequence. It is a precipitate fall from grace. From an uneasily admired challenger to American dominance, with predatory  pricing, bullying, spying, cyber-snooping as some of its stock-in trade.

But this brazen, bald-faced, bio-warfare, dressed up in “wolf warrior” garb, is seen as the last straw. The immensely delayed investigating team from the much compromised World Health Organisation (WHO), has been prevented from investigating. The 29 member team was left cooling its heels in Beijing for a month before returning home, none the wiser. It got nowhere near Wuhan where the pandemic originated.

China has even had the effrontery of opening another bio-warfare laboratory in Pakistan to develop Anthrax and like substances right in the middle of this pandemic.  

Covid-19 is, we now know, a lab grown virus that has used the still incurable AIDS virus as a base, before building a superstructure unprecedented for its evil and varied potentials.

Red China, that once had a double-digit growth trajectory built on trade and exports has, in recent years, faltered to half its former growth rates. It has long been estimated that it needed a minimum of 8%, with its 1.4 billion population, in order to stave off civil unrest and chronic food shortages. But, for some years now, as the global economy went into recession after the crash of 2008, Red China has only been growing at a nominal rate of under 6%.  The food shortages have already come. Worse is likely to follow.

In the same period, probably to supportits considerable infra-building capacities that had no more work to do domestically, it has undertaken an expansionist foreign policy.

This has preyed on small economies with grandoise infrastructure projects, paid for with Chinese loans at commercial rates. China has signed on the infrastructure built or under construction, plus the territory, mineral rights and assets of these small countries as collateral. It could be the East India Company all over again, except this is the 21^st century and not the 18^th.

 China has simultaneously gone on a strenuous military muscle-building spree, designed, to rival that of the United States. All of this has, at 6% or less growth rates, in an ostensible $12 trillion economy, led to dangerous internal and external indebtedness. There is little or no return on investment to show for it. How bad the financial situation is is difficult to say. It is an opaque economy window-dressed to serve its purposes.

The pandemic unleashed on the world was probably designed as the coup de grace. China hoped to pick up the best of everything everywhere for a pittance as the world lay supine. But it has not gone according to plan for Beijing.

Like Germany before, through not one but two world wars, China persists in the myth making of its recently acquired greatness, if not invincibility. Times have changed, the world has moved on, as they are saying to Daniel Craig in the 25^th iteration of James Bond, to hit our screens shortly. President Xi Jinping must have No Time To Die screened for his entertainment.   

In 1914, militarism consisted of stacking up more armaments than the targets, combined with a solid will to fight. Even a megalomaniacal desire to dominate. It ended up very wide off the mark, bogged down in trench warfare, that killed millions to bullets and squalor alike.

In 1939, it was, once again, pretty much the same thing but with tanks and better fighter planes in the Luftwaffe. There was immense aerial bombing. There was a charismatic Fuhrer. Both times, Germany was devastated and crushed by the very countries it sneered at as weak, spineless and unprepared.

This time, the villain is Red China. But times have changed, with a built in checkmate to the chess board. In an environment bristling with nuclear weapons, the shooting wars have to be necessarily circumspect. Like an intended duel to the death, the protagonists will have to make do with a sabre cut or two, rather than any true thrusts to the heart.

Mutual self-destruction is not a viable option, no matter how ambitious a country or its dictator might be. But then China apparently likes following the Art of War and the hokey-bunkum it preaches.

What might work when used sparingly as a mind game, cannot survive the uncensored information sharing and scrutiny of the internet and social media.

The Art Of War in this context has been reduced to shadow-boxing puppets for the entertainment of opium addled users lying on their wooden pillows. But this is not turn of the 19th century Shanghai, however picaresque.

China still hopes threats and deception will work as well as bullets, and why not? Have they not yielded substantial results already? They have scared thousands of square kilometres of territory out of India, captured Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet. This was Chairman Mao’s work in the first flush after 1949. The world was tired after WWII, and probably couldn’t be bothered to deal with him.

But Xi Jinping, leader for life of both the CCP and the PLA and all organisational machinery in China, cannot do likewise. He cannot take and keep the South China Sea, the lands its wants along the LaC with India, in the captured territories of PoK and Gilgit Baltistan, from Japan, and in some 17 other places and countries where China has invented supposedly  ancient territorial  claims. His map wars are comical travesties. He cannot even bribe the limited number of weak vassal states enough, because China does not have the money. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), President Xi’s pointless flagship project, is facing a funds starvation too.

China’s delusions of grandeur and lust for lebensraum are just as poisonous as any dreamt of by Germany in 1914 or 1939. But it is the retrofitted jet black-haired President in his late sixties, that is  day-dreaming them now.

Perhaps Red China has been spoilt and led to its imminent great fall by the West, Iran’s “Great Satan”, after all. As the $1 trillion manufacturing underbelly of the developed world, it has been indulged from the Nixon-Kissinger led 1970s.  

On China’s part, there is a tendency to believe its own propaganda. The West, the CCP has long believed, is far too decadent to upset its own apple cart. Successive American Presidents since Nixon, have, after all, left China well enough alone, and constantly fed its vanity.

President Trump therefore must be an exception, Red China hopes he’ll soon be gone. But if he wins a second term, will he persist and hold his present confrontationist course?

There will be dire consequences for this latest caper of spreading a lab-grown pandemic. Red China will be crippled economically and physically so that it no longer poses a threat to anybody, let alone America. It is unlikely to survive another decade with its present borders. That has been China’s fate in the past and the future beckons an encore. A balkanisation plan is ready and raring to go at the Pentagon.

 This is also where India comes in. For its own survival it cannot run away from the battle. It is urgent that India must get a predatory China and its satellite Pakistan off its back. We have reached a tipping point, and this is the event coming up must decide the future. India is ready, because this showdown has been brewing ever since 1962.

For this decisive change to happen, India must effect a military victory on both the LaC as well as the LoC and its international borders with Pakistan. This action, albeit in slow motion, is unfolding already, with the covert and powerful military backing of the US and its allies, including Israel.

The Quad with Japan, Australia and the US is about to be formalised. Russia is very much with India still and will conduct  joint naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal shortly.

The Andamans will permanently monitor the Malacca Straits, a key choke point for China, with a Quad base there. American bases at Guam and Diego Garcia are on full alert will play their part.  The US carrier fleets near Taiwan and the South China Sea are also ready for combat. The Indian, American, British and French navies are all in the Indian Ocean and the Chinese environs.

The military details of quite how this victory against China and Pakistan will be executed is best not speculated upon here. But it is preordained by the powers that be. It will become part of military history in India and abroad for decades to come.

China will not win this one any more than it has failed to win in any confrontation with India after 1962. The reason is there is a critical mass in India’s ability to resist invasion built over the years. Its diplomatic linkages presently are at their zenith too.

The most glaring weakness of the PLA, already exposed, is that front-line Chinese troops are not very good soldiers. They don’t have their heart in the fight. They are mostly forced conscripts who do not want to die.

The career Chinese generals and politicians might want it to be different, but they too don’t seem to leave their arm-chairs. Morale is low on the Chinese side. The only thing rising in decibels is the propaganda from Global Times, a Red Chinese mouthpiece, and ever ruder threats from Chinese leaders and diplomats.

So let us fast forward beyond the confrontations to come very soon, and visualise what a win against Pakistan and China simultaneously is going to do for India.

In the international arena, India will be seen as the St. George that has valiantly and single-handedly sent the dragon packing, without, this time, in its 21^st century version of the medieval tale, slaying it outright. It will have won a proxy war for all the Western powers and Russia too.

The Chinese will experience, once again, within a century, the agonies of  an incredible loss of face.  This one debacle, in Ladakh,  Siachen, Akshai Chin, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan - will see to it.

And the main reason is because Red China, with all its military equipment, does not know how to fight a war. It has also miscalculated its own credibility and standing in the global community. It is isolated and desperate. Its vaunted trade clout is melting away and being taken up by a group of nations that are not menacing anyone.

Longer term consequences for China will see Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia being hived off as truly autonomous regions, their integrity guaranteed by the US. Taiwan will be recognised everywhere as a separate country. Hong Kong will become independent. Tibet will be freed. The balkanisation plan at the Pentagon is serious business.

India will enter into a golden period, economically, diplomatically and  technologically, in harmony with all the worthwhile nations of the world. This epic military fight with China and Pakistan, a High Noon moment, is the golden key to India’s future.

(1,964 words)

For: Sirfnews

September 4^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee