Develop border villages to counter Chinese designs

Lt Gen Pradeep Bali (Retd)

Military Commentator

China has a penchant for reinventing history and tweaking geographic realities as this suits its hegemonic interests and designs. This takes the shape of manufacturing ‘facts on the ground’. While the Chinese have often staked their claims to vast swathes of Indian territory, they have been on a spree of renaming habitations and terrain features in Arunachal Pradesh in recent years. The Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry released the first list of such newly invented names in 2017, mentioning six places. The second list, renaming 15 locations, was brought out in 2021, followed by 11 new names in 2023. The fourth and the latest list under this geographical name game, covering 30 places in Arunachal, which the Chinese refer to as Zangnan, came out on April 1, 2024. As expected, India has strongly objected to and rejected this gimmickry.

Parallel to this exercise, in the garb of developing border areas north of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), China has been establishing settlements called Xiaokang or ‘prosperous villages’. While over 600 of these border habitations have come up in recent years, 175 more such villages are planned for development. This entire process is ostensibly being carried out to bolster its territorial claims and serve the purpose of creating infrastructure for dual use by its People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Here, the Chinese stratagem of legal warfare is in play as settled populations are not to be disturbed as and when the LAC is finally demarcated, as per the 2005 Border Defence Cooperation Agreement with India.

Similar shades of this Chinese strategy can be seen in its disputes with other nations. The Senkaku islands, administered by Japan, are claimed by Beijing with a Chinese name — Diaoyu. It is also well known that China’s nine-dash line to buttress its territorial claims over the entire South China Sea (SCS) is against international laws, particularly the United Nations Convention of the Laws of the Sea. This claim line overlaps the Exclusive Economic Zones of Brunei, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. China has been pouring concrete into the seas, converting shoals and rocky outcrops into ‘islands’. The objective behind this manufactured geography is securing military advantage and presenting its neighbours with a fait accompli.

This proclivity of taking geographical and historical liberties was in ample display in western Bhutan in 2017, when the PLA tried to occupy the Doklam plateau right up to the Jhampheri ridge. This riled India as it would have impinged upon its security concerns, and had to be physically stopped by the Army.

An interesting case of geographical emasculation is that of the Tibet region, occupied by China in 1951 and taken under complete control in 1959. Chinese rulers created the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which roughly corresponds to what may be called ‘Political Tibet’ and is much smaller in size than the actual Tibet. Historically, ‘Ethnic Tibet’ consisted of three major areas — U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo. Amdo was amalgamated into the Qinghai province in 1955 and the Kham area into the Ganze Autonomous Prefecture in 1957. Similarly, other areas with Tibetan ethnicity were merged with Gansu and Yunnan. The TAR consists only of U-Tsang out of the original Tibetan homeland. Between 1911 and 1951, Tibet was free of the paramountcy of the Republic of China. The 14th Dalai Lama was born in Amdo and his bodyguards are from the Kham area, renowned for the warrior traits of its ethnic Tibetans.

China has also engineered an internal migration from the overcrowded Han homeland in the east to various parts of Tibet, and most of the border villages coming up across the LAC have ethnic Hans living in them. These Chinese migrants are incentivised with major economic benefits — a key element in the Sinicisation of Tibet.

India’s response to China’s Machiavellian strategies has varied from indifference to jingoism. The latest renaming game has elicited a very measured response from Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. Addressing a public gathering in eastern Arunachal on April 9, he said: “I want to tell our neighbours that changing names will not achieve anything. Tomorrow, if we change the names of places or states in China, will it make them ours?”

Our border issue with China has largely remained a bilateral concern. However, the US, of late, has been throwing its weight behind India. The recent statement by its Ambassador in India Eric Garcetti, that “China has no business renaming places that are part of India’s territory,” was a welcome step. Further east, the Chinese perfidy in the SCS has invoked strong international reactions. The Quad alignment, which includes India, Australia, the US and Japan, the AUKUS grouping (Australia, UK and US) — which Japan is likely to join soon — and the trilateral alignment among the US, Japan and the Philippines are all focused on a rules-based world order in the SCS to counter Chinese hegemonistic designs.

India needs to emphatically and repeatedly call out any changes, historical or geographical, which China tries to engineer. We need to strongly raise these issues and place our objections on record to counter manufactured claims, lest they should become accepted facts.

We suffer from a terrain disadvantage across the borders, for the area on our side is geographically hostile with steep mountainous terrain and thick forests in most parts, right up to the LAC. Our own area and infrastructure development has to stay the course, whatever the cost, and the Border Roads Organisation has been trying to meet this challenge. The recently inaugurated Sela tunnel in Arunachal is aimed at bolstering India’s operational preparedness along the LAC. However, the enormity of the task requires capability enhancement for operating in high altitudes.

We need to encourage settlement in border villages in order to check migration. Economic opportunities and faster communication are stepping stones in this regard. While the Army can lend a helping hand, the policy formulation to facilitate all this is the domain of the political leadership. Furthermore, the sensitivities of the Indian citizens who populate these border areas need to be always kept in mind.

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