New Delhi’s deepening alliance with Washington has alarmed Beijing and intensified border tensions, says a report in The Financial Times.
According to the report, “Simmering tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors have been inflamed by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump’s hostility towards China and the US president’s strategic embrace of India and Mr Modi”.
It says: Indian and Chinese troops are now locked in a tense stand-off at multiple locations along their disputed 3,488-km boundary on the Tibetan plateau. Various rounds of talks — including this past weekend — have failed to resolve their differences.
The paper quotes a South Asia expert saying, “India has been active in many of US plans that target China.”
Liu Zongyi, a South Asia expert at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the newspaper, “If India hastily joins a small circle that perceives China as an imaginary enemy, China-India relations will deteriorate.”
The report quotes Ashley Tellis of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as saying, [The Chinese] think India is uppity, they think India is punching above its weight and they want to bring it down a notch or two.
The “standoff is a revolutionary development with far reaching consequences”, says an analysis we published last week. In the realms of international power projection, nations must always live within the limits of their potential”, the article said.
Another article we published last week looks at the standoff from the security situation in the region, and the multibillion dollar Pakistan’s China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) snaking though Pakistan from China and to the Arabian Seashore in Balochistan.
China and Pakistan –decades old allies, call themselves “iron brothers” and “all weather friends”.
Islamabad’s civil-military leadership is said to be on same page (according to their statements), that Delhi may undertake a false flag to divert world attention from the Kashmir situation.
A senior military official told DesPardes last month that a military adventure against Pakistan is PM Modi’s “Go To” option.
