Abhijit Bhattacharyya | After 60 years: Beijing still focused on targeting Delhi

Do a majority of Indians remember the October 1962 damage which dictator Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China (CPC) and its militia

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) inflicted on New Delhi’s sovereignty, diplomacy and defence? Sixty years have passed. Has anything really changed — for better, or for worse? A few landmark events reflect the harsh reality.

The Dragon, regrettably, is still on top as India struggles with present-day CPC dictator Xi Jinping’s multi-front assault. India is being harassed from all angles and its diplomacy and defence moving from one front to another, both internal and external. The Dragon is determined to impose its ill will with congenital deception, deceit, duplicity.

With Xi Jinping anointed as a re-incarnation of Mao, the CPC’s founder supremo, a relook at his “malevolence and perfidy” (as rightly diagnosed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in his famous November 8, 1950 letter) will give a clearer picture of what awaits India’s future at the hands of the CPC’s current “core” lifetime emperor. After India’s crushing defeat in the battlefield in 1962, the CPC supremo’s brigade of politico-military guards set Northeast India on fire by creating several “liberation armies”, fully armed, trained and funded by the Red Chinese to pin India down to its own backyard. The message was clear: “Stay put at home, allow the Hans to gallop the globe”.

The next salvo was fired on May 24, 1967 at Naxalbari, a small hamlet in northern West Bengal, bordering Nepal and a stone’s throw from what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and just hours by road from Chinese territory. The CPC-PLA had penetrated deep into the relatively industrialised state of West Bengal to strike at New Delhi’s hinterland with the hard-line violent Marx-Lenin-Mao doctrine of the Naxalites.

Mao, after fanning the stormy “Cultural Revolution”, the fundamentals of which were to castigate, criticise and abuse all Chinese predecessors, unleashed a reign of terror through gangs and goons, known as the Red

Guards, who pounced like mad dogs to spit, slit and slap Indian envoys (such as K. Raghunath and V. Pillai) in broad daylight in Beijing. To rub India in the worst possible way, Mao also held an 80-minute meeting in Beijing with a group of Naxal leaders in December 1967.

The Dragon’s dictator was pushing for a “people’s revolution” in India, using surprise attacks to seize weapons from policemen, and to annihilate small groups of policemen at different locations. Mao’s ideological gospel of violence ran thus: “India should rely on workers, farmers to solve problems. We (proletariat) don’t rely on Gandhi and Nehru … to solve problems”. The Mao-controlled CPC-PLA gang loved interfering in the internal affairs of foreign countries; especially those which were “target countries” – much as Xi Jinping continue to do so today, as evidenced in Ladakh two years ago, no matter what the barbs emanating from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing this week targeted at the West, in relation to Taiwan!

India undeniably fell under the CPC-PLA radar from the very beginning and there’s absolutely no reason to believe it is any different today. The Hans injected the poison deep into the Indian heartland.

One of Mao’s most diabolical acts was to use China’s Kathmandu embassy to distribute money to Indian renegades, giving a clear signal that along with India, Nepal too stands as one of the principal targets of the CPC-PLA for expansion, destruction and subjugation through any means, fair or foul. It was clear to Beijing that without breaking

Nepal’s traditional links with India, it wouldn’t be possible for the CPC-PLA to expand its footprint in South Asia.

Over five decades have passed. Has China sobered down, and become more civilised in its behaviour? Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, who is all set to inherit Mao’s mantle as “core” leader, is even more aggressive, and his uncouth “wolf warrior” diplomats are spreading division, hatred, lies and utter falsehoods, particularly in this region. The Chinese ambassador in New Delhi says that India’s border with Tibet (usurped by China) has now moved to “normalised management”, a clear indication that the CPC-PLA will stick to their positions in eastern Ladakh, and have no intention to vacate Indian territory they usurped in 2020. For the Dragon, any talk of reverting to the pre-May 2020 status quo ante is dead.

The ambassador says: “China is willing to continue with the dialogue through diplomatic/military channels for a peaceful solution of border issues.” What he is really saying is: “Forget your Galwan casualties. The area now belongs to us (China). Just move on, do business and allow China to make one-way profits.” The annual bilateral trade, incidentally, amounted to $130 billion last year, with one-way profit of $85 billion for Beijing. But the Indian trading class did not do too badly either, selling cheap Chinese goods in this country.

While China has started issuing visas to a few Indian students to return to their classes in that country, there are many thousands waiting, and it is unlikely that many of the 25,000 students left in the lurch will be able to go back. The Chinese always do things according to their convenience, and not because of any other compulsions. The CPC-PLA have been tasting Indian blood for over 60 years, and sadly now there are many Indians who rely on the China trade even if it compromises India’s sovereignty. Taking advantage of the India-Bangladesh water-sharing discussion, the Dragon’s wolf-warrior in Dhaka has promised to splurge over $1 billion that will lead to irreversible damage in the sub-Himalayan land to ensure establishing its strategic hegemony to peril all in sub-Himalayas. The Dragon today’s trying to pin India down on the same terrain adjacent to Naxalbari, where the fire ignited by the CPC in May 1967 engulfed eastern India for more than 15 years.

As India completes six decades of the ignominious defeat, political humiliation and loss of sovereignty inflicted by the CPC-PLA, the situation today is far grimmer, with China systematically trying to decimate India’s economy and defence sector, and giving aid, encouragement and refuge to insurgents of all descriptions, especially in India’s Northeast. The CPC’s hostility is endless. In 1967 it took India’s Communist Terrorists (CT) to Mao’s durbar in order to harm Delhi. In 2022, the CPC took a section of India’s Capitalist Traders (CT) to Beijing to assault Delhi’s economics from within. One can only hope New Delhi makes a course correction, without further delay, and doesn’t get taken in by the Middle Kingdom Maoists’ charm offensive of “perfidy and malevolence” — as Sardar Patel had warned us over 70 years ago.