By not bowing down to Chinese intimidation, India can train Asia on how to stand up to a bully.
China today has all its territorial frontiers embroiled in dispute. Be it Senkaku Islands with Japan in the East, or the Indo Tibetan Boundary in its West, or the South China Sea in its South, or the Mongolian borders in the North.
Except for Pakistan which is all set be a Sino-colony under China-Pakistan Economic Corridor; China has boundary disputes with nearly all its Asian neighbours.
During many of these skirmishes with its neighbours, China often uses ‘Psychological Warfare’ that has inherent components of warmongering, media led propaganda, shift-of-blame tactics and rhetoric that bespeak of arm-twisting.
The recent dispute at Sino-Indian-Bhutan tri-junction of Doklam has also seen similar high-handedness at the hands of Chinese. From open invitation to war through its state newspaper – The Global Times, to launching racist videos in an attempt to openly mock Indians; China has done everything to create favorable public opinion to its side through this “physiological warfare”
However, unlike other of its neighbours, India has maintained a firm unshakeable stand and has kept maintenance of the “status quo” at the borders as a precondition for talks.
Right from the beginning; we have not seen any shift in Indian stance that focuses mainly on “dialogue” alone as a solution. However, it shall also be worthy to mention here that we are not hesitant to compromise on our internal security and can adeptly deal with any extremity by force, if required. Our leaning towards the peace and stability in the region should not be understood as our weakness to deal with the situation.
India, as our Union Minister of Defense has proclaimed, “is not that of 1962”. It shall be grave miscalculation on the Chinese side to replicate 1962 scenarios in lieu of scoring domestic political mileage.
For other nations like – Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan that have time and again been subjugated to Chinese brash now have an example in front of them in the form of India. They must now know on how to deal with a egoistic dragon that leaves no stone unturned to purposefully create conflicts.
Earlier these nations, hardly had any precedent to follow or to imbibe religiously, but with India seeing eye to eye with dragon; the Asian community is largely apprised of changing geopolitical situation in region. To save the continent from getting into a state of misbalance, India today has become natural choice for being considered as “Pivot” of Asia.
This in fact can be witness from our very active foreign policy. In order to contain China, India has been receiving visible support from USA, Japan and Australia on various fronts such as military support and freedom of navigation.
It would be appreciable to observe that a strong-willed government at centre has keenly taken note of China’s stand on India’s NSG membership or Masood Azhar. It has not even bowed down to Chinese threats on Dalai Lama’s visits to Arunachal Pradesh, leave alone Doklam.
In the light of such scenarios, it can be effectively said that India has already won a “war of perception” against Chinese “psychological warfare”. We are not bothered by increasing economic clout of China or its commanding polity whatsoever. Through our ‘look east’ foreign policy, we have already made deep inroads into the Asia-Pacific. Now the time has arrived that we take on the collective leadership of the region and be a defensive barrier to one any one-sided bullying.
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