View: Whether China steps back or ups ante, it will lose in Doklam

By Kanwal Sibal
When the news lacks real content exaggeration serves as a filler. This is true of the latest press reports of Indian and Chinese patrols clashing on the Pangong lake in Ladakh, implying a linkage with the Dokalam standoff and China opening pressure points elsewhere on our long border with Tibet.

Actually, such jostling on the lake waters occurs often and is nothing new. When India plied slower, inferior vessels on the lake and the Chinese were equipped with speedier, more powerful ones, they had the advantage and got the better of us in these jousts, but with India acquiring heavier American-built boats there is more verve on the Indian side in such encounters.

This testing of horsepower on the lake will go on, but the important thing is that agreed protocols are being observed and, even if stonepelting has taken place according to unverified reports, no bullets are being fired by either side. This is remarkable as men in uniform are observing discipline and self-restraint even when in direct physical contact with the “enemy”.

Not much should be read either into China skipping the ceremonial border meetings on Independence Day and failing to invite the Indian side on August 1 to celebrate the founding of the PLA, as has been the established practice in recent years as part of mutual confidence-building gestures. For one, the Chinese seem to have explained politely at the local level their inability to attend the August 15 ceremonial meeting in view of the present circumstances, leaving the door open for continuing informal friendly contact on the ground.

Actually, if the Chinese had invited the Indian side on August 1 and accepted our invitation for August 15, they would have embarrassed themselves politically. With their belligerent rhetoric at the official level, outrageous outpourings of the state-controlled media against India and blinkered analysis of the situation by their reputed India experts, a show of amity and goodwill at the India-Tibet border would have been incongruous, to say the least.

They would have made a mockery of their own ultimatums and threats. India would have publicised these border meetings on days that are of symbolic importance to both sides, much to the discomfiture of those in China baying for Indian blood because of our temerity in checkmating them on the Dokalam plateau. It would have been read as a signal that China is not planning to open up new fronts and that its bluster should not be taken at face value.

Those enamoured of China — there are many in the West and more numerous in India than is warranted by years of China’s adversarial policies towards us — and have romantic notions about it wrongly believe that as a country it is almost infallible in policy-making because it calculates and plans carefully in a longer-term perspective. In reality, China has made horrible mistakes internally and externally.

The Great Leap Forward cost millions of lives and the Cultural Revolution has proved an absurdity in view of the rampant capitalism in China today, the brutal exploitation of its peasantry to achieve break-neck economic growth and Xi Jinping’s promotion of Confucian values (and other sources of Chinese culture) as embodying “the spiritual experiences, rational thinking and cultural achievements — that have nourished the flourishing Chinese nation”.

Externally, China has alienated virtually all its neighbours and, with the breakdown of its ties with North Korea, has no friend except a semirogue state like Pakistan. China’s provocation in Doklam is another mistake. Whether it steps back or raises the ante, it will lose.

(The writer is a former foreign secretary. Views expressed here are his own)