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| Tawang is India’s | | Chinese are again pressing for it | |
THE visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to India warrants a dispassionate look at the whole question of the boundary issue. The issue is bound to come up, overtly or covertly, when the leaders of both the countries sit together in informal, one-to-one talks. To ignore or down grade this vital subject at the alter of the so-called gains from the expanding trade and economic ties between the two countries, would be like missing the proverbial wood for the trees.
As long as the boundary question is not resolved, at heart India and China will remain adversaries pitted against one another.
The reported Chinese view that India restore Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh to Tibet, before any concessions can be made by it in other sectors of the Himalayan border, should ring alarm bells in South Block and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). They should not overlook military and strategic considerations by agreeing to such a demand in haste.
That the Chinese always mean business should be clear to anyone who claims to know China well. On a recent visit to China this writer has seen the steely and disciplined resolve in the eyes of the Chinese soldier who stands guard at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in the countryside.
As a former GOC of the Tawang Military Garrison, with intimate knowledge of the two country's joint border meetings at Bumla, one is only too aware of the meticulous and persistently focused Chinese mind and way of working.
They never really give anything away, and this would apply to reports that in return for Tawang they might consider certain concessions in Ladakh and the Aksai Chin region. Actually, if anything, the Chinese are strengthening their stranglehold in that region, with projected rail and oil pipelines across the Karakoram mountains, links from the western Xinjiang province to parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the northern belts of Pakistan.
The existing Xinjiang rail network could one day provide access to major water ports in Pakistan, just as any give away in the strategic Tawang mountain belt could give China a major ingress to the Brahmaputra plains and sever from India virtually the whole of its North East.
To the south of Tawang, barring the Sela and Bomdila massifs, there is little of note till the Chinese Claim Line of the Brahmaputra riverline.
The recent expansion of the Chinese rail line in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) opposite the Indian defences, its major expansion of road networks in Tibet and Ladakh, and the corresponding minimal and incomplete road infrastructure in Arunachal, with no rail networking in the Valley, what to mention Ladakh, clearly point to the Indian deficiencies in vital infrastructure. Without such infrastructure available at the crucial time, wars can well be lost.
As it is, the higher Tibet plateau provides China with forward air bases that India cannot possess because of the topography, and losing the Tawang district would unbalance further both the air and land defences.
One hopes that the IFS and IAS officialdom in the MEA and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) listen carefully to what the Chief of Army Staff and the Army Commanders on the ground should be telling them from time to time.
The loss of Tawang will not only amount to the loss of the second oldest monastery in the world, but also undermine the Watershed Principle of international border management that is universally recognised. Its loss also would mean saying goodbye to Bhutan and with it the Himalayas in our northeast.
The unhinging of Tawang will lead to a ripple effect in the strategic arena all the way to the tri-junction along the Indo-Myanmar-Tibet border.
There is also little merit in suggestions made in certain quarters that a kind of a Tibetan religious hold be extended over the Tawang monastery to assuage Chinese interests, as it must be remembered how much the Buddhist life, outlook and culture revolves around the monastery and its Rimpoche.
Even if, for argument’s sake, such a proposal were to be accepted, its overall effect on the Dalai Lama and his following in India and abroad would need to be measured in real terms.
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