Sinositis Relapse?

How are South China Sea and Balochistan connected? Via the dragon ofcourse.

- Pranav Sharma

BALOCHISTAN, where China has sunk in $46 billion to build the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, connecting Gwadar port with Xinjiang—a key infrastructural piece of President Xi Jinping’s one-belt-one-road project—is fast showing signs of becoming a new headache in the already uneasy Sino Indian relations.

The Chinese leadership is busy battling a move by the US and its allies to keep a possible mention of the ongoing tension in the South China Sea at the G20 Summit in China’s Hangzhou on September 4-5. Beijing has been lobbying with member countries, including India, not to be a party to the West initiated move. Balochistan was hardly an issue China expected India to raise—it not only adds fresh strains on the frayed India-Pakistan ties but also has the potential of drawing China into it.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, had surprised most people with an unprecedented reference to the appalling human rights condition in Balochistan and the plight of the Baloch people under Pakistan’s military might.

“This will not help Pakistan to become a normal country. And it will also further disturb India-China relations,” Hu Shisheng, director of South and South East Asia at the Beijing-based China Institute of Contemporary international Relations (CICIR) told the IANS news agency in a recent interview.

Interestingly, China has not reacted officially to Modi’s remarks but used Hu, a known hawk in the Chinese scholarly establishment, to raise concerns. The worry that India may also use non-state actors in Balochistan, as Pakistan does to export terror to India, and thus jeopardise the multi-billion dollar CPEC infrastructure, drawing China into the fray to protect its prized project, was highlighted by Beijing through Hu.