plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Our Neighbours Our overlords:: A repeat: (I had written this in 2013):
Chinese influence in Africa, South America and elsewhere runs very deep. Unknown to India, Chinese Navy is in close training and learning arrangements with Brazil, for example. : Submerged but audible to the sensitive sonar like the Jing and the Shang.
China works to long term strategic plans that move step by step for decades towards a specified goal, China was active in Africa since the 1990s. They had an operative there in Nairobi who ran the best Chinese Restaurant in town, spoke English with his family and was point man for Chinese plans in Sub-Saharan Africa. He carried a PRC Passport and was close to the Pakistan High Commissioner. He traveled a lot and was quite open about China's intentions. The plans were ready and waiting for the money to flow from the Chinese export boom to the US. I knew him well in 1995-1999 and was often invited for his soirees, with free food and drink to discuss matters related to the Internet and Information and Communication Technology.
China's long term contracts for raw materials and so on were done quietly but went on as stated, without secrecy, beyond the preoccupation of White House and Euro Centric media with other matters.
Pakistan is a more nuanced case. Pakistan was the sword arm of Saudi Arabia which is the long term ally and funder of US opinion and decision makers. (Since Nixon, Kissinger and Sheikh Yamani forged the US-NATO-Sunni Axis). It is Pakistan that brokered the US-China entente cordiale. Nuclear weaponisation came to Pakistan from the US (not China which handed over help with missiles and subsequent evolution of Nukes into tactical (battle field) weapons to both Pakistan and North Korea later)) albeit through various routes, including Europe where Holland was an integral part of the CSIR (South Africa)-Israel Nuclear Weapons program and from where A.Q.Khan procured Pakistan's centrifuges.
I used to be a frequent visitor to the CSIR facility on Meiring Naude Road, Pretoria during the '90s and was on a Nile cruise in December (Christmas) 1996 watching Egypt's best belly dancers with Musharaf, Qaddafi and Mubarak on my way back from an Internet seminar at Oxford. I was, at that time, based in Nairobi working on bringing the Internet to Africa. Chinese plans have fructified, inexorably,including the highway from China ending with a Chinese Port on the Arabian Sea in Pakistan.
Pakistan selected Balochistan for this in order to secure Chinese help to control Baloch rebellion which is now being brutally suppressed with Chinese help. India, with characteristic stupidity, is not fishing in the troubled waters of Pakistan.
The US has shoved Russia towards China by escalating the William Lewinsky Clinton begotten Cold War with its Ukraine mischief. Which allows the China-Pakistan axis a stronger hand while weakening India even further. Pakistan has successfully locked in the US while moving closer to China than the US-NATO-Sunni Axis might wish. This is why the "Strategic" Long term plans for the People's Liberation Army that was approved by China's National People's Congress (Parliament) more than a decade ago needs to be taken very seriously. Lebensraum it is.
As for India, it is still constitutionally preoccupied in plundering hapless Indian rendered into Thrid Class citizens by India's grotesque Constitution for the benefit of its Nouveau Kleptocracy. Condemnded by it plagiarized Constitution to a perpetual state of civil war that has pushed India down to 135 out of 172 countries in Human and Social Development and 143 out of 172 countries in Internal Peace and Stability, India is easy prey. Both China and Pakistan know this. So does the rest of the World. Their actions speak louder than words.
That Nehruvianism works in India is not in doubt. The better man loses in Courts, and elsewhere to the raw power of Stalinism, but to expect countries outside India's border to succumb willingly to Nehruvian Hobby Horses might be a step too far.
If, indeed, India's ruling politicians and bureaucrats had National interest in mind rather than their own, would they have gone on public record announcing that Daulat Beg Oldi does not belong to India? The "Hon'ble" (for they are all honourable men) External Affairs Minister, Salman Khurshid stated that possession of Daulat Beg Oldi is all about "perceptions" and the Hon'ble Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde proclaimed Daulat Beg Oldi as "NO MAN's LAND". Well, it is China's now. Line of "ACTUAL CONTROL". Remember? And Chidambaram will deftly refocus India's hackles on the threat within: "Saffron Terror" is the existential threat to India he will say in support of Rahul Baba's whispers into the US Ambassador's ears..
"Possession is nine tenths of the law". While the Home Minister might hope that China will forget what he said, like India's vote-fodder will forget Coal Gate and Bofors (which last, he expressed in a public speech), this is unlikely. China works out its strategies on a fifty year horizon. In International Fora, they will now claim, with considerable credibility, that India's rulers officially gave up their claim on Daulat Beg Oldi and that it is the jingoism of isolated media and military elements that are pushing for India to grab well established Chinese territory.
Pakistan provides India's rulers with a comparatively harmless bogey man to bully for their Indian "limited bullets" audience. It is when these jackals that rule India encounter lions like China and the US, that their mettle is exposed. The World will not stand still and wait for India to catch up. India’s ruling elites have had an easy time of exploiting the starving, illiterate, defecating-in-the-open, vote fodder to pass totalitarian laws and strip the middle class through inflation or expropriation for squirreling away in their "safe haven" accounts.
They are nonplussed when they come across a foreign power that, as is their own wont, does not adhere to established rules. They do not have competence or integrity because the Indian political system does not give power to either factor. Corruption, which is high treason, as it hollows out the Nation, is the primary qualification to rule India. a few days ago, the Govt agreed further amendments to the anti-graft law to ensure that India’s corrupt extortionists are still better protected from retribution and that it will remain business as usual.
The signals on China’s intentions towards India were loud and clear long ago. In this regard, I had written in the Los Angeles Times and the Japan Times advocating an alliance between India, Japan and the US in 2006. The PLA’s recent documents presented to their "New" Rulers on the doctrine of "War Zones" and starting “limited wars” in their periphery to become militarily unchallenged are explicit. India, though, has always had a penchant for the ornamental and the absurd rather than any traction on National Security because the limits of the horizons of India’s ruling elites is the "Z Class" personal security that they probably feel will protect them from all enemies and the "strategic depth" that will allow them to withdraw and re group in Switzerland and Mauritius.
This is why,India's ruling tyrants have always preferred, like the Nazis and the Czars to persecute enemies of their choice. Hapless innocents who can be easily raped, murdered, jailed without evidence and bullied. This is why they have extended their British born hatred of Brahmins to Saffron.
Courtesy: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10156447489588082&id=683703081