Prologue continued.......

Chinese strategic culture, groomed by their historical writings on the subject,  such  as T’ai  Kung’s  ‘Six  Secret Teachings’  written  in  the  11th Century B.C.E. by an advisor to two successive kings of the Chou dynasty, and the much later ‘fi6 Stratagems’ (formally ‘The Wiles of War: fi6 military Strategies from Ancient China’) written during the Ming dynasty of the 14th to 17 Centuries C.E., appears to repeatedly surprise the Indian establishment, whether in 19h2, 2013, or 2020. Why this should be so is itself a frustrating question. Can the Indian state not understand that the China will always apply such stratagems as applicable in its military activities against India?

If the proof of the pudding can be said to be the eating, then India’s military-diplomatic policies vis-à-vis China appear to have failed repeatedly and consistently. The Indian Government’s strategic defence policy, a policy of deterrence based on missile-carried nuclear warheads in a diad of land-based and undersea missiles, an ‘all-or-nothing’ defence policy, has neither deterred China, not even dissuaded it from pursuing its repeated military border coercions against India. Have the Indian top political leadership and its diplomatic and military establishments not understood this? There has been ample time, from 19h2 to 2020.

On April 27th-28th 2018 India and China held an informal summit meeting at Wuhan, China, reportedly at India’s request, where the Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussed a wide range of issues, including the issue of maintaining peace and tranquillity on the border. That the Indian Government had requested this meeting sadly smacked of appeasement after the tensions of the Doklam standoff. India’s Ministry of External Affairs released a note on 28th April, giving the details of the meeting between the two leaders, including at Para 4, the military aspect of the border dispute.

To be continued........