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Journalism of Courage
The government’s decision to build seven new strategic roads in Arunachal Pradesh marks the long overdue reversal of a disgraceful national policy on frontiers. The fear that China would take military advantage of India’s road networks was always an unreasonable one. Although China occupied parts of the then North East Frontier Agency in 1962, it quickly withdrew. The Chinese knew they could never hold on to the occupied territories. If its decision to attack India was political, its decision to withdraw was pragmatic.
But the 1962 war with China has left a deep scar of defensiveness on the Indian strategic mind. The decision to reverse that policy and build roads in Arunachal, to improve its internal connectivity right up to the disputed border with China, signal a new sense of self-confidence in the Indian national security establishment. New Delhi has for too long viewed some of its border territories as mere security problems and abdicated the responsibility to modernising them. The conscious policy not to develop Arunachal was worse than the British colonial approach. For Imperial Britain, many of the regions lying beyond the “inner line” were merely pawns in the Great Game with China and Russia. The Foreign Office deserves full credit for taking the initiative to change the old mindset in New Delhi, and piloting the project to build new roads all along the China border.
The threat from China today is not military but economic. China believes that the development of its own border regions demands the projection of its political and economic influence across the national boundary. Having worked this new policy to great effect on its frontiers with Indo-China and Myanmar, Beijing is all set to make a big impact on its South Asian borders. China’s breath-taking modernisation of its transport infrastructure in Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan, have now positioned it to raise its profile in the subcontinent. The Indian response should focus on modernising its own border infrastructure and creating capabilities for transborder economic influence. The construction of new roads in Arunachal Pradesh is only the first step.
