Beijing is fashioning water into a political weapon by denying India flood-related hydrological data since May, even as major flooding has hit the region from Assam to Uttar Pradesh. Data on upstream river flows is essential for flood forecasting and warning in order to save lives and reduce material losses. China’s data denial crimps flash flood modelling in India.
The two-month border standoff between China and India is not a huge concern for the Chinese business community in India because few are expecting a full-fledged war between the two Asian giants. The biggest worry for them is the chronic shortage of Chinese staff in India.
The military border standoff between China and India in the Dong Lang area (Doklam) reveals India’s geopolitical ambitions and motivation to use “protecting Bhutan” as an excuse for its own superpower dream. To defuse the crisis, India should immediately withdraw its troops from the area.
The more power China has accumulated, the more it has attempted to achieve its foreign-policy objectives with bluff, bluster, and bullying. But, as its Himalayan border standoff with India’s military continues, the limits of this approach are becoming increasingly apparent.
The wider world has largely forgotten that short border clash 55 years ago, playing out as it did in the shadows of the more momentous Cuban missile crisis at the peak of the cold war. But in this part of the world, the ghost of that war still lurks – it is the key to how the world’s two most populous nations imagine one another.
More than the global and domestic situation, the biggest difference between the two stand-offs is their respective locations. Forty years ago, the two armies were confronting each other on territory claimed by both India and China. Now the face-off between India and China is in a plateau contested between Bhutan and China.
Even as China and India once more come nose to nose and eyeball to eyeball across the forbidding glaciers of the high Himalayas, the United States must resist the temptation to pour gasoline on this potentially dangerous conflagration even though more than a few U.S. (and global) arms merchants would benefit from the intensification of Sino-Indian military rivalry.
Great power disputes have the potential to wreak havoc throughout Asia, as the Sino-Indian faceoff shows. From New Delhi’s perspective, China continues to try to encircle it from the north, not only in Bhutan but also through the Sino-Pakistan alliance, which links a growing and aggressive power to India’s deadliest enemy, one that has nuclear weapons trained on India’s major cities.
One is a veteran journalist who has watched the India-China engagement for six decades, and disagrees strongly with the official Indian narrative. The other was India’s Ambassador to China until 2016, and has been one of New Delhi’s key negotiators with Beijing. The Indian Express put the same set of questions to both.
