CHINA is India’s real-time nightmare. India’s paranoia is discussed in Ram Udhav’s book Uneasy Neighbours (2014). He quotes a prediction that India’s threat will come not from Pan-Europeanism but from “Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism”.
He repeats the warning given in 1950 to Pandit Nehru by his home minister Vallabhbhai Patel: “In the guise of ideological expansion lie concealed [China’s] racial, national or historical claims. The danger from the north and northeast, therefore, becomes communist and imperialist”.
Nehru ignored him, believing that Hindi-Chini were bhai-bhai. The subsequent 1962 conflict in Arunachal Pradesh (China’s Zàngnán) exposed India’s vulnerability: strategic, military and political.
China’s adhesion to Pakistan is now well tested. It is, to adapt Mani Shankar Aiyar’s mantra, an “uninterrupted, and uninterruptible” bond. China is Pakistan’s dependable friend; India has become their avowed enemy.
China’s adhesion to Pakistan is now well tested.
The next Indo-Pak spat may be within six to 12 months — time for India to replenish its armoury and update its cyber competence. Meanwhile, Pakistan will receive China’s technological advances which are being upgraded by the minute. India fears China will supply Pakistan with the latest fifth-generation JF-35 fighter aircraft and allow access to its 400 surveillance satellites, and to bolster Pakistan’s ground, air and marine capabilities.
How will a nearly insolvent Pakistan pay for these boons? It does not need to. China is repeating what the Soviet Union did in the 1960s, when it bought sugar from Cuba at irrationally inflated prices. A Russian general explained that theirs was not an economic decision but a strategic one.
US arms supplies to Pakistan always came with the safety catch that they should be used only against communism (ie not against India). Russian weaponry to India though was Pakistan-specific. China attaches no such caveats. China needs India — for target practice.
In Gaza, the human targets of Israeli PM Netanyahu are Palestinians. Over 50,000 have died, 70 per cent of them women and children. The oldest was 97, the youngest a day old. Yair Golan (the former deputy commander of the IDF) argued: “A sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the goal of depopulating the population.”
Last week, Dr Alaa al-Najjar (a Palestinian paediatrician) received the corpses of nine of her 10 children. The eldest of them was 12. Her grief is of Biblical proportions. She laments as King David / Hazrat Dāwūd once did: “Would that I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son!”
Killing babies is not a hobby, adds Moshe Ya’alon (an Israeli former minister of defence). He sees through Netanyahu’s callous strategy. It is “a government policy, whose ultimate goal is to hold on to power.”
In India, Yashwant Sinha (formerly Vajpayee’s minister of finance and later external affairs) suspects Modi of imitating Netanyahu: “He asked for votes in the name of Pulwama martyrs during his election rallies [in 2019]. Now, this new incident [Pahalgam] is again being politicised for electoral benefit[.] The government cannot continue hiding behind vague and fabricated statements.”
Congress’s Rahul Gandhi attacks from another flank. Deflecting the BJP jibe that he is a “poster boy for Pakistan”, Rahul asks why Modi “bowed down to Trump” and why Modi’s “blood boils only in front of cameras”.
An unfazed Modi facing yet more cameras countered: “Mother India’s servant Modi stands here with his chest held high […] Modi’s blood is hot. Now it’s not blood flowing in Modi’s veins, but hot sindoor.” PM Modi has more use for sindoor — hot or cold — than does his estranged wife Jasodhaben.
In the West, Trump demands that Nato countries must bear the cost of defending each other. The International Institute for Strategic Studies calculates the bill for Nato countries to be over $340 billion, mainly for “400 fighter aircraft and 600 main battle tanks”. It estimates “that over 70% of total rearmament costs would go toward air and naval forces”, a paradox considering that wars with Russia are “primarily land-based”, as the conflict in Ukraine has proved.
In Rome, on May 18, the US-born Pope Leo XIV granted a private audience to President V. Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader expressed his belief that “the authority and voice of the Holy See can play an important role in bringing this war to an end.”
This must have evoked derision in Putin’s Kremlin. Russians still recall how in the 1930s, advisors cautioned Josef Stalin that Pope Pius XII might not appreciate Stalin’s pogroms against Catholics. Stalin retorted: “How many divisions has he got?” Pope Pius replied: “Our divisions are in heaven”.
Heaven is overcrowded with those who throughout history died fighting for peace on earth.
Originally published by Dawn, Pakistan. His piece is included here by kind permission of the copyright holder F.S. AIJAZUDDIN.
