Abhijit Bhattacharyya | India must rethink strategy at borders to contain China

What lay in the pages of history is resurfacing as scary reality in pockets of South Asia today; as India faces one of the most challenging times of the revenge of geography, an outcome of 1947’s Partition. India’s land border, as is well known, has always been a soft target for outsiders. Continental theorist Halford Mackinder had perceptively observed: “In the British Empire there’s but one land frontier: the Northwest Frontier of India”. Mackinder’s was an astute observation, but today it can be expanded further, and include the whole of the northern and eastern borders of India. The efforts to fence the Pakistan and Bangladesh frontiers is laudable, but it loses effectiveness due to the non-fencing of the Myanmar and Nepal borders. The country can’t be protected by guarding two frontiers and two others unguarded.

Otherwise, the inevitable revenge of physical geography will be back to hit the political geography hard, through myopic local politician-instigated restless and reckless demography, leading to more future Partition-like crises of mass killing. One may just look at India’s neighbourhood of the earlier smaller, friendly states. Does the present scenario inspire mutual trust and confidence as in the past? All of them have faced political coups or upheavals, and the forced entry of the Communist Party of China, openly or by the backdoor, in a sub-Himalayan zone which was never its area of geopolitical interest. A country of India’s size, or any country with some position and location features, can’t ignore reality of geography. Society, the polity, economy, sociology, history, culture, civilisation, traditions -- all are geography-guided, geography-influenced and geography-fed.

Today, the leadership of India’s northern landlocked neighbour Nepal has inexorably shifted its vision to the Pacific Ocean, despite being an integral part of South Asia’s intertwined dynamics. Nepal joining CPC dictator Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is the ultimate red line for India. All the more because the 1,750-km India-Nepal open land border constitutes the worst nightmare as a number of hostile elements from China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal are bound to penetrate India’s hinterland with ease. New Delhi has understandable concerns about the vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor or the so-called “Chicken’s Neck”. But will an enemy only exploit the well-known Chicken’s Neck to target New Delhi? Or will he make use of other easier routes to exploit the vulnerability of the vast open space spanning 1,750 km? Won’t they follow Sun Tzu’s Art of War of “surprise, deception, mobility”?

To our west, India’s immediate neighbour has its polity in a state of perpetual tsunami due to its own making. There’s nothing in sight as yet for that tsunami’s self-destructive mode to reduce its mass or velocity. Far from it, it’s now an unguided missile. Doesn’t the scenario of a “Reunited Pakistan”, with Dhaka back as the eastern wing of a “Greater Pakistan”, seem like an attempt to give India a taste of revenge for December 16, 1971? For the eastern neighbour, the best of times is obviously past; the present looks like a nightmare. Despite the inherent vibrancy and versatility of the population, the frequent changes in the political mood always led to suicidal violence in Dhaka. India is well aware that the challenge of geography in the east always originated from unpredictable psychological vibrations. Hence, the changes in its polity invariably happens with electric speed. India can expect more of it.

Further to the east, there are diverse and varied ethnic groups whose differences with each other has given an opportunity to hostile external forces to exploit divisions and sow mischief. This kind of behaviour by the Han-dominated CPC is unlikely to cease anytime in the foreseeable future. The turbulence of the polity in India’s Northeast has given room to the CPC to deepen its penetration of the South Asian land mass.

Going south, towards the great Indian Ocean, the tranquillity and serenity of some island nations is getting harder to preserve. The naval dragon is reluctant to allow port, big or small, to operate in India’s vicinity without being gobbled up under the ambit of the CPC’s Belt and Road Initiative. For this and other reasons, the CPC finds Hindustan to be the easiest of targets. It just has to play the waiting game effectively.

This is why the Indian government, the political system and the people in general need to do a major rethink on our border strategy: on the division of existing states and the creation of new border states, particularly in the northeastern region. Key threats to India’s national security originate from the internal disturbances triggered by political disunity, putting the whole system into disarray by deflection from the “real issues”.

Strangely, Indians haven’t learnt the lessons of the 1947 Partition. One must consider the strange phenomenon that almost every Indian state bordering Nepal and Tibet (occupied by the Chinese Communists in 1950), has been internally partitioned and broken into new states. The state of Jammu and Kashmir became two Union territories; Punjab was broken into three states; Uttar Pradesh was split into two, as was Bihar; and the single state of Assam was carved into five states.

The creation of smaller states may serve short-term political interests, but has anyone calculated the devastating strategic dimension of partitioning states which border China, Nepal and erstwhile East Pakistan? Won’t it only help neighbours expand their reach into the sub-Himalayan terrain to expand their zone of influence across South Asia? Does such partitioning create stability or sow the seeds of enduring mutual hostility? Does it help India build a stable polity or enable China the opportunity to sow seeds of perpetual internal conflict and disharmony?

India must conduct a long-term cost-benefit analysis of the geographical parcelling of border states due to internal bickering, hatred and hostility, enabling hostile powers to fish in troubled waters and destabilise her polity and destroy its economy. The matter is urgent, there’s no time to be lost.