China syndrome

The prime minister,the national security adviser,the army chief and the foreign secretary all had to speak up,within a span of 48 hours,to cool the China discourse that was drifting dangerously over the last few weeks. Their intervention might have arrested the escalating tensions with Beijing; but there is nothing to suggest that our system is ready to address the three structural reasons for the malaise at hand.

First,the prime minister and his team rightly pointed to the aggressive hype from a section of the media. But where was the government before it was compelled to intervene at the highest level? Everyone from junior officials on the ground to the top guns at the Centre seems to speak to every item on the scroll running at the bottom of our TV screens. Yet there is not one authoritative voice either political or bureaucratic in this government that is charged with offering clarification,let alone spin,on the breaking news of the day. Second is the dark veil that the government has thrown over the nature of our boundary dispute with China and the negotiations to resolve them. Our China chaos will continue until the government learns to be transparent and educates our chattering classes about the complexities of our northern frontiers.

Finally,since the normalisation of relations with Beijing began in the late 80s,New Delhi tended to cloak bilateral difficulties with such vacuous slogans as Asian solidarity and multipolarity. Deluding itself,New Delhi could not and did not see the very visible and breathtaking Chinese plans to modernise the transport infrastructure in Xinjiang and Tibet across the Himalayas. This included the extension of rail networks to Kashgar and Lhasa,new roads all along the 4000 km border. Taking full advantage of the new infrastructure,the PLA launched aggressive patrolling of the frontier and a vigorous assertion of its territorial claims. Shaken out of its slumber a few years ago,the UPA government ordered the much-delayed modernisation of the transport infrastructure on our side of the border. Typically,very few of those plans have moved forward and no one in the government seems accountable for those projects. India must talk less and do more,on a war footing,to improve the nations access both military and market to the China frontier. Otherwise,there will remain fertile conditions for hawkish posturing at home and unpreparedness on the border.