The India Today issue datelined June 8, 2020, carries more than a delicious oxymoron: what was considered Nuclear-armed China-India (Chindia) rising falling down to “clashing with clubs and stones” across portions of the 3488 km long LAC that separates the two countries; thus darkly echoing a quote often attributed to physicist Albert Einstein about how a future war would be fought. That the two nations which did $90 billion of bilateral trade, of course, added a key strand to the irony. So did the expected outcome of the General Officer level border talks between the two warring nations at the Chushul/Moldo border meeting point on June 6, 2020 whereby among chants of both sides “seeking a peaceful way out” the MEA indicated that both countries were in for a long haul before a tenuous peace can be restored across the alpine Himalayan wastes. This, even as Lt Gen SL Narsimhan (Retired), a member of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) remarked that “reading into the happenings of the past few days, there is a possible solution”.
Readers will of course wonder how Chindia; the clever marketing buzzword of 2008 vintage has come down to streetfighters like slugfests and stone-throwing with both sides soldiers carrying weapons sheathed and with barrels pointing downward; having last fired weapons in anger 45 years ago at Tulung La in October, 1975. Both sides are reflecting a refrain which amounts to neither breakthrough or breakdown… Just “stasis in glacial progress” as it has been since November, 1962 as veteran defence analyst C Uday Bhasker put it succinctly in an article datelined June 8, 2020.
This story is from the June 2020 edition of Geopolitics.
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This story is from the June 2020 edition of Geopolitics.
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