Apr 21, 2012
It takes a soldier to know the true horrors of war. As soldiers who have put their lives on the line, seen up-close the bestiality of conflict, and ordered young men into mindless battle, Generals don’t talk lightly of war in the way that armchair analysts do.
Yet, former Army chief Gen JJ Singh, who today serves as Arunachal Pradesh Governor, has stirred quite a controversy with his peacenik comments vis-à-vis China.
Addressing a seminar in Itanagar last month, Singh dismissed the frequent chatter of a looming war between India and China as “utter nonsense.”
Is a land-for-peace deal a possibility? AFP
“I must tell these futurologists and experts to stop this nonsense of predicting an Indo-China war, first in 2010, then in 2012 and now in 2020. They will be proved wrong as we will not fight. We are competitors, not rivals,” he said. “These experts have no ground knowledge, they don’t know that Chinese and Indian soldiers actually play volleyball on the borders.
But it was Gen Singh’s comments on the merits of a “land-for-peace” with China that have set the cat among the pigeons.
It was important that the border dispute be solved, “and for that some give-and-take is necessary,” he noted. “India will have to move away from our position that our territory is non-negotiable.” India , he added, should be prepared for a bit of “give and take” with China, and perhaps even give away some territory in order to secure a peaceful resolution of the Sino-Indian border dispute.
Given that Gen Singh is Governor of Arunachal Pradesh, the sensitive border State over all of which China claims territorial sovereignty, his comments gave rise to speculation that he was being used by the UPA government as a “trial balloon” to float what is bound to be an unpalatable idea: of giving away land to secure peace with China.
Such a significant statement from someone who holds an official position as Governor could not have come without at least the tacit backing of the Central government, it was felt. Even given Gen Singh’s record of “loose cannon” indiscretions of the past, his latest comments bore the stamp of official approval.
The BJP on Friday criticised Gen Singh’s remarks and said that matters of strategic import ought not to be bandied about loosely. “Issues of accession and territorial integrity are very sensitive to India,” BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.
Gen Singh has since clarified that he was merely articulating his personal view, and that his comments had been quoted out of context. He nevertheless reiterated that only a spirit of “give-and-take” could resolve disputes with China over some portions of the Line of Actual Control.
But was Gen Singh really off the mark in suggesting that India should begin an internal debate about the merit of making (unspecified) territorial concessions to China in return for the promise of peace?
As Firstpost has argued earlier (here), ‘Land for peace’ agreements are notoriously hard to sell to a domestic constituency – even for a government that enjoys immense popular support. For one thing, they always entail giving away something now (land) in return for a promise of peace for eternity (which can be broken anytime).
Yet, it’s fair to say that India’s policy – since Nehruvian times – of claiming that there is no border dispute with China, and that therefore there is nothing to discuss, has only compounded the problem. Over time, it led to a hardening of China’s stand, which, combined with Nehru’s reckless advocacy of a ‘forward policy’, virtually invited the 1962 war, the scars of which India needlessly nurses today.
Since then, both countries have held several rounds of talks, but have failed to make headway, in part because China has since 1985 shifted its negotiating position in response to its changed strategic needs (more details here). But in equal measure, Indian negotiators also feel cramped by the fact that the domestic hyperpartisan political environment would never countenance territorial concessions to China. In a sense, Índia’s negotiating strategy is stuck in 1962.
But India need no longer be traumatised by the loss of that war: since then, it has vastly enhanced its military capability, even if – as the recent revelations of India’s inadequate military preparedness reveals, it isn’t “war-ready”.
For far too long, we’ve draped ourselves in a false sense of nationalism and kept alive dreams of a restoration of an “Akhand Bharat” (which encompasses even present-day Afghanistan). Yet, the reality of India is that the maps as we see them don’t quite match the situation on the ground: we therefore find ourselves tilting at overseas publication that wage “cartographic war” on us – by depicting the reality of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
As geopolitical analyst Parag Khanna notes (here), there is nothing permanent about maps and about political boundaries. For sure, this could also mean that there is nothing permanent about China’s current-day borders either: Tibet may one day be free. And Pakistan could some day balkanise, leaving India to take back PoK. But those cannot be the base-case scenarios on which we formulate our negotiating stand in disputes.
The balance of power between India and Pakistan has shifted to India’s advantage over time; today, as Firstpost noted here, theazaadi dream that Pakistan nurtured in Kashmir is virtually dead. Yet, with China, the balance of power has if anything shifted to China’s advantage. And India’s stand that there is no border dispute to negotiate with China has, over time, only weakened India’s negotiating position.
Wisdom lies in not repeating the folly of the past and looking out for pragmatic solutions that involve prudent give-and-take, as Gen Singh suggested.
India faces a million mutinies at home, and faces enormous developmental challenges. A border conflict with China is the last thing we need. And if that means preparing the ground for an honest conversation at home, without resort to reflexive territorial jingoism, perhaps we should give Gen Singh’s “personal comments” a fair hearing.
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