Off-centre | The China-Pakistan Anti-India Axis: Decoding the Poonch and Dantewada attacks

On 20 April, the eve of Eid-ul-Fitr, an army truck reportedly carrying fruit for distribution, was ambushed by terrorists in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Five armed service personnel were killed in the attack. A week later, on 27 April, right in the middle of the 10th meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in New Delhi, the enemies of India struck again. This time in the dreaded Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh which, over the years, is usually in the news only when a deadly Maoist attack kills Indian soldiers. This time, the death toll was 10 District Reserve Guards and their driver in the Aranpur area. After the fact, there is usually much analysis of intelligence failures or departures from SOPs (standard operating procedures). But even common sense would indicate that deep in the jungles of the region are still functioning camps and cadres that can hit specific targets to hurt the Indian state at will. Are the two attacks connected? Is there a grand security threat against India which we are not taking seriously enough? Such questions are bound to crop up after every such attack on Indian assets. But in this case, the proximity in timing gives us a rare opportunity to cross the t’s and connect the dots as it were. In my last column I spoke of India’s borders with Pakistan and China, totalling over 6,500 kilometres, in addition to a coastline of 7,500 km. This makes India one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to any attack by hostile foreign powers. And we have two enemies on both sides of our borders, Pakistan to the West and China to the North East. To say, therefore, that managing India’s security is a tremendous challenge would be to utter a truism bordering on the banal. Yet, as a State and a nation, we do not seem to have paid sufficient attention to this challenge. There are historic reasons for this. Our freedom struggle, led by Mahatma Gandhi, emphasised non-violence not only as the avowed Congress method of gaining freedom from British colonialism, but also as our post-Independence state policy. The grave miscalculation, if not suicidal error, of such a naively idealistic view of India’s defence requirement was realised a few months after Independence when Pakistani army-backed Islamist tribals militia invaded Kashmir. Major General DK “Monty” Palit’s biography, Major Gen A.A. Rudra: His Services in Three Armies and Two World Wars (1997), contains the astonishing revelation that it was the Kashmir invasion that saved the Indian Army from being disbanded. After Independence, General Sir Rob McGregor MacDonald Lockhart, who was India’s first Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army upon India’s independence, presented his strategic defence plan to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. According to Major Gen Palit, Nehru’s reaction left Lockhart shell-shocked: “The PM took one look at my paper and blew his top. ‘Rubbish! Total rubbish!’ he shouted. ‘We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is ahimsa (non-violence). We foresee no military threats. Scrap the army! The police are good enough to meet our security needs.’” After two major and two minor wars with Pakistan, one major war with China, and continuing hostilities on our borders with both countries, we have come a long way from Nehru’s Himalayan blunders. Yet, the question remains: have we moved sufficiently swiftly or surely to contain, if not overcome, India’s security threats, both external and internal? The two recent attacks on India, one on or border with Pakistan, the other deep inside the Indian territory, close so to speak to the very navel of the nation, indicate that the answer, unfortunately, is no. Says former military intelligence and Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) officer, RSN Singh, “While we Indians are sensitized about the ongoing proxy war by Pakistan, there is very little or no consciousness that Maoism or Naxalism is actually a proxy war by China being waged against India for last five decades”. In today’s India, especially May Day 2023, when the world acknowledges the struggles of the working classes, we in India ought to reflect on the role that Communists have played in destabilising our country. Especially when it comes to Maoists or Naxalites, no one ought to have any doubt about their continuing anti-state ideology and extra-territorial loyalty. In fact, Sinha unabashedly calls India Maoists “China’s Proxy Soldiers.” “It would be naïve,” says Sinha, “not to read the writing on the wall. There are many apologists of China in every strata and segment of Indian society…. The same constituency earlier argued that there was no evidence of China providing WMD technology to Pakistan. Countries, like China that aid and abet insurgencies in other countries, are conscious enough of maintaining the deniability factor especially when it comes to physical evidence.” But when it comes to India’s Maoists, we should not have such doubts. As Charu Mazumdar, Naxalite leader and idealogue, famously put it, “China’s Chairman is our Chairman and China’s path is our path.” All we need to do today is substitute Chairman Mao with Chairman Xi Jinping. [To be continued] The writer is an author, columnist, and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.