Global opinion against China in Ladakh

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will note from Kargil and earlier in 1987 and 1962 that the Indian Army does not retreat.

There is a bristling national resolve to ensure that the PLA goes back to its pre-April positions behind the China side of LAC. 

The Narendra Modi led government knows it is treading on hot coals and will be hounded out at the first sign of capitulation to a neocolonial aggressive nation.

The construction of Defences and road infrastructure on the Indian side of Line of Actual Control (LAC)  is none of Chinese business. As a sovereign nation with a military, India can defend itself, especially in Ladakh where the Chinese are at a logistical disadvantage, just as they are in the Indian Ocean Region militarily. 

Nobody wants a war but this is no 1962 or 1999, and if push comes to shove, China will bleed too, not having fought a war since 1967, which it lost to Vietnam!

Any border conflict will mean loss of market to Chinese exports and sustained Indian diplomatic amplification of the Wuhan virus at global multilateral forums stretching from the WHO, to the G7, to the UN Security Council.

The Indian Military is in a strong place on the land, in the air and at sea, besides in cyber warfare and space warfare to give the Chinese a very bloody nose,  who are involved in multiple revisionist pursuits globally, including  in Taiwan, HongKong, and the South China Sea. 

The global anger in the international community against Covid-19 pandemic omissions and commissions by China will go in the support of India in any border war that China provokes with its misadventures and its racist overconfidence.

India is an idea whose time has come; despite what China wants or thinks of its place in the world order as a superpower, its efforts to contain the rise of Bharat will not succeed. If anything such expansionist gambits push a once non-aligned India deeper into the embrace of the Quad, a coalition of other sovereign powers aligned against the dragon’s revisionist menace including Japan and Australia.

India, once the pariah hated by US President Richard Nixon and sanctioned by the Bill Clinton administration, was never so wooed by America as it is today – with no less than a dozen open overtures early in the Ladakh Standoff timeline, starting from the US President, State Department, and other political watchers. The offer to mediate was noted and politely declined but in any shooting war will make the Chinese position on the global scale that of a expansionist aggressor.

The border with India which has been intentionally kept festering by the Chinese to grab territory is facing an increasingly strong oversight and military resoluteness from the Indian public opinion. Both Sumdorong Chu and Doklam saw the loss of face for Beijing in its hegemonic pursuits blocked and made untenable in military logic by the Indian military. The world must expect much more of these conflagrations unless the LAC is converted into the International Border and territory illegally usurped by China in Aksai Chin and Shaksgam Valley for its Belt and Road empire building returned to India in a just settlement based on facts and not some Chinese folklore myths.

The Chinese run state media has been thick with propaganda targeted at both international and Indian public opinion. This has had a contrarian effect in raising the hackles of a population distracted by the pandemic. As India loosens its draconian lockdown, many concerned voices in its citizenry is waking up to the full import of the PLA outrage in Ladakh.

Today, despite the Covid-19 impact on its economy, India has enough residual national willpower and military heft to compel the PLA to behave itself. If compelled, even by returning the use of military force. A bristling India is exploring multiple options to counter the cold war launched by Beijing through both conventional and non-conventional warfare as an open adversary. In these optics it is impossible for any nationalism mandated government to ignore such an incursion bordering on invasion with thousands of troops locked in confrontation across a cold desert in Eastern Ladakh region. In the event of shots actually fired in anger the world led by America will weigh on the side of its new ally in India. This will make any border war assume a far larger footprint than it would have had even a decade ago. Beijing has unleashed a risky gambit in its effort to grab territory and push the envelope in the choos unleashed by the Wuhan Virus. The world will not stand by and look the other way.

Let us hope better sense prevails and these expeditionary stunts meant for internal audiences chafing from economic stagnation, frustration at competing systems of other China’s in Taiwan, and Hong Kong succeeding better than the draconian Communist model are restrained before they become blunders in the rise of the middle kingdom.

Icarus flew too close to the sun, and burned his wings, and in Ladakh the sun burns your skin to a black cinder!