A decade-old Chinese military document that has resurfaced recently provides fascinating insight into Beijing’s misplaced assertions about the way New Delhi views its neighbours. The 372-page document, titled zhanlue xue (loosely translated ‘The Science of Military Strategy’), was published by Beijing-based People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences in 2013.
The document, prepared by PLA’s Academy of Military Sciences faculty with “very high-level review”, has been translated by Montgomery, Alabama-based US Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute [CASI].
Among other things, the document lays out China’s tactical outlook vis-a-vis India.
India’s military strategy: What China doesn’t get right
Referring to traditional ideas of Indian strategist Chanakya, the PLA document says that New Delhi is deeply affected by his traditional idea “that treated neighbours as enemies.”
Experts view this Chinese assertion about Indian military strategy as completely misplaced.
“This statement is a reflection of [China’s] limited understanding of Indian foreign policy or a deliberate attempt to create confusion,” Suyash Desai, Taiwan-based research scholar on China’s military and foreign policy told WION.
To secure its national security interests, India in the past has taken militarily and economically coercive measures in its immediate neighbourhood, points out Anushka Saxena, Research Analyst with the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at Bengaluru-based Takshashila Institution.
For example, after Nepal purchased Chinese military equipment in 1988, India refused to renew the Indo-Nepalese singular trade and transit treaty up until April 1990 when democracy was restored in Kathmandu’s corridors of power. Similarly, part of the reason why Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government sent Indian Peace Keeping Forces in Sri Lanka in the early 1990s was to “alleviate India’s concerns surrounding LTTE terrorist activity that impacted our national interests”, Saxena added.
“Has India taken coercive military and economic measures to deal with its neighbours in the past? Yes. Is there some degree of Indo-centrism reflected in this? Yes. But does that mean India did so because it considers its neighbours enemies? No,” Saxena told WION.
India wants Tibet as a “buffer state”: PLA document
The PLA document states that since independence, India has “fully carried on with the United Kingdom’s imperial expansionist strategic thought”. This, the document adds, included India attempting to incorporate Tibet into its sphere of influence as a “buffer state”.
A “buffer state” refers to a neutral country between two larger hostile countries whose state of neutrality is aimed to prevent the outbreak of a regional conflict.
“Every big country invests in buffers around it or at least wants to be surrounded by countries which are friendlier to it, also known as the ‘sphere of influence’. Generally, the Indian governments have, at least in the early decades of Independence, seen merit in such British ideas,” Sridharan Subramanyam of Chennai Centre for China Studies told WION, adding that.
While New Delhi had no formal foreign policy to treat Tibet as a ‘buffer state’, the Chinese aggression into Western Ladakh in the mid-1950s was aimed at providing its G219 highway a buffer through Aksai Chin, he noted.
China’s G219 National Highway passes through India’s Aksai Chin region, under illegal Chinese occupation since the 1950s | Google Maps
“After all, as a ‘buffer state,’ Tibet would have retained its status as a sovereign nation-state, which it had always been, and would have benefitted the most from dealing with both the big powers on its two flanks,” Subramanyam reasons.
Reflecting upon the complex history of Tibet’s tryst with China and India, Anushka Saxena of Takshashila Institution pointed out that the British did see merit in making Tibet an “autonomous buffer” to prevent the Russian aggression south of China and towards its territory in India in the years of the ‘Great Game’ between London and Moscow.
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“The British also made concessions to China through the Anglo-China Treaty of 1906 and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 that recognised Chinese ‘suzerainty’ over Tibet and maintained that any conduction of foreign relations with Tibet was to happen through Chinese diplomatic offices.
“However, with the People’s Republic of China’s expanding historical territorial claims after the Communist Party of China established its rule over the country in 1949, Tibet was eventually brought under effective Chinese control, ending its status as a buffer three years after Indian independence from the British,” Saxena said.
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