Himalayan blunders

Perhaps no country has faced as many invasions as India. During the ancient period, we defeated world-conquering armies that invaded our country. However, during the medieval period, beginning with the second millennium, we suffered successive defeats at the hands of numerous invaders with disastrous consequences.

The Panipat syndrome of lack of strategic vision, not learning from the past and remaining unprepared, compounded by disunity, has been haunting us.
The origin and history of Pakistan has been of relentless hostility towards India. Within weeks of Independence, Pakistan invaded Kashmir on October 22, 1947. Since then, it has launched repeated invasions of India. For the last three decades Pakistan has been carrying out cross-border terrorism.
Pakistan aligned itself with the West primarily to obtain military weapons for use against India. It also developed close relations with China to serve the same purpose. On its western border, it had strained relations with Afghanistan. The Durand Line, imposed by the British, divided the Pashtuns between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The latter does not recognise this line. The Pashtuns under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and after had been very friendly towards India. We should have taken advantage of this and followed Chanakya’s Mandala doctrine, based on the enemy’s enemy being a friend.
Unfortunately we chose to ignore Afghanistan, otherwise our victory in 1965 would have been more decisive, and in 1971 we could have also won decisively in the west. Today, when Pakistan has managed to unite the Pashtuns on both sides of the divide with the glue of religious fundamentalism, we are providing millions in aid to Afghanistan. This has been earning us much goodwill. On his recent visit to Kabul, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was invited to address the Afghan Parliament, which no foreign leader, including Pakistan’s, has so far done. The big question is whether this bonhomie will continue after the US withdraws and the Taliban come to power in Kabul. The recent move by India to provide military weapons and training to Afghanistan can prove very fruitful if the present regime continues in power.
Kashmir has been a running sore for over six decades. We have blundered from one folly to another, scoring repeated self-goals. The US, looking at its own interests, has been pontificating that India should resolve the Kashmir issue so that peace may reign in South Asia. It does not realise that Kashmir is not the disease but its symptom. Even if Pakistan is handed Kashmir on a platter, it will continue its hostility towards India. The Indian Army has defeated repeated Pakistani invasions and has been inflicting heavy attrition on terrorists from Pakistan in Kashmir, keeping the borders intact. Yet we do not seem to be doing too well in Kashmir for lack of a suitable road map. We have not been able to counter the false propaganda of Pakistan and the separatists. India has also failed to effectively project its case on Kashmir. Delhi is not only upholding secularism in Kashmir and ensuring national integrity, but also contributing to the safety of the international community from jihadi terrorism. Yet India has been losing on the media front, both nationally and internationally. In Gilgit-Baltistan, legally part of India, Pakistan has denied basic democratic rights to its people. It is the only surviving colony in the world. Its people are predominantly Shia but Pakistan has been following vicious anti-Shia policies. It has been settling Pashtuns and Punjabis to change the region’s demography. There has been repeated violence and unrest but we have not given any help to these people, not even moral support. In 2005, India agreed to the opening of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road without getting the Kargil-Skardu road opened. Pakistan has gifted 5,000 sq km of territory in Shaksham Valley to China. The recent induction of large numbers of Chinese engineers and military into this area on the pretext of development and maintenance of the Karakoram highway has added a new dimension.
A couple of weeks before his death, the ailing Sardar Patel wrote a long letter to Jawaharlal Nehru cautioning him of the implications of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He urged defence preparedness in the Himalayas. His sage advice was ignored. Misled by the euphoria of “Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai”, the nation felt the pain of the debacle of 1962. Tibet used to be a buffer between India and China. With China occupying Tibet that buffer was lost in 1950. Nepal has been another buffer, which we now seem to be losing.
India has had close cultural, civilisational and religious links with Nepal since the dawn of history. We have an open border with no passport or visa regime with Nepal; the Nepalese in India enjoy the same facilities as Indian citizens; and a Nepalese citizen joining the Indian Army can become India’s Army Chief. Over 50 lakh Nepalese find employment in India. This includes one lakh in the Army and paramilitary. Forty-five per cent of the Nepalese population is of Indian origin closely interlinked by linguistic and matrimonial ties with Indians across the border. Among the remaining 55 per cent of the population on the mountains, there are over 10 million India-employed and pensioners plus their families. Being a landlocked country, Nepal’s economy is heavily dependent on India. For every Nepalese crossing into China, over 1,000 come across to India. No two countries in the world have such an intimate relationship. The UPA-1 government outsourced India’s Nepal policy to its CPI(M) partner. With Communists in power in Kathmandu, China has acquired an edge over India in Nepal.
Since the Seventies, China has been building up its military strength and infrastructure in Tibet. We had lapsed into our pre-1962 strategic myopia and were surrendering thousands of crores of rupees in the defence budget every year. China’s string of pearls strategy and increasing belligerence since 2007 has woken us up. Mountain divisions are being raised and modern military hardware is being acquired. Military infrastructure is also being improved in the Himalayas. All this is time-consuming but we must work on them on a war footing. We do not need to have an arms race with China. The mountains provide an inbuilt advantage to the defender. This must be exploited. We should have sufficient strength to deter any Chinese military adventure. At the same time, we must maintain superiority over Pakistan in both conventional and nuclear warfare, concurrently countering a combined threat from both China and Pakistan. We may have strategic consensus with the US, but we cannot rely on its support to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. The US, keeping its own national interest in mind, is likely to continue to provide assistance to Pakistan which the latter will use against India. We must be self-reliant and build the required military strength to meet the combined threat from Pakistan and China. At the same time, we must break China’s string of pearls strategy by reaching out both to our close and distant neighbours.

The author, a retired lieutenant-general, was Vice-Chief of Army Staff and has served as governor of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir.