Civil Military Relations and Media

Why Blame China? We are a House Divided

One of the articles published in the Chinese Institute for International and Strategic Studies has talked of the ease with which India can be divided into 20-30 parts in the future to prevent the country from rising as a strategic rival for the top spot in Asia and in the world. This article has invoked a lot of heat and debate in India. This was expected given the fact that China is India’s rival and a strategic adversary in most of the situations. It is also somewhat surprising given the norms governing international relations that no one speaks so blatantly of dividing the neighbour, even if one so desired, more so if you take pride in your ‘peaceful rise’ in international relations. Moreover, the policy of beggar thy neighbour is simply dated in the era of economic cooperation and nuclear weapons.

Even as the analysts in India get angry about the perception of certain Chinese scholar about India, they must not lose sight of the fact that the author is only reiterating what we always knew. We must not let our nationalistic feeling masquerade the fact that behind all our perceptions of national unity, we are a house divided. We become united only when someone from outside exposes our fault lines, only when terrorist come out and spray bullets and kill our innocent citizen, only when an arms suppliers literally arm twists us into paying huge amounts of money for a piece of dated junk and only when we play cricket against Pakistan or remember Kargil. However, what we do to ourselves each day, silently, and as a part of routine, does not even pinch us.

So no nationalists and security experts raise their voices when political parties play regional or religious cards as it happened in many states of the country including recently over installation of a statue of a poet from another state! No one asks questions when casteism overpowers ideas of social justice, when elitism overpowers inclusive policies as happened when parents opposed poor children’s participation in the elite schools, right in the national capital. No one even raises a question beyond a point when a woman is stripped off her clothes in the middle of the street for no fault of hers, or when armed forces rape and kill innocent women in the conflict affected region of Kashmir to derail the years of peace process. Why do we not consider these instances of national shame as threats to national security? Why do we allow silent tearing of the country’s delicate fabric by our own people when we have not done enough to strengthen it in the first place?

Ask a Chinese on what he thinks of India’s shining democracy and he will point out to our hunger deaths. We can not and must not hide behind the hard work of our forefathers who gave us democracy and let our poor die silently even as our food stocks soar. Even if Chinese want more liberal space inside their country, they trust in their regime’s ability to deliver. The communist regime has some excellent achievements to its credit. It has eliminated the feudalism from the Chinese society and created social structures based on equality and equity during the Maoist era. It they have leapfrogged years to achieve spectacular results in human development indicators like education, hunger, gender and social mobility when China was behind India in 1950s. These are the indicators on which our record is comparable to some of the sub-Saharan countries even now.

It is one thing for a Chinese scholar to notice the country’s fault lines and it is another for us to deny our own weaknesses. It is a routine affair in international affairs research to build scenarios for possible outcomes and in this exercise major attention is paid to the country’s problems and achievements. Westerners have routinely written about the collapse of countries, almost all of them, but not all have come true. Even Indian scholarship predicts doomsday for Pakistan and looks for India’s options in the eventuality and scholars tend to forecast Chinese problems and highlight their fallouts, for the Communist regime and for the world. Countries have also tried to exploit the internal problems by promoting irredentism with supply of arms and monitory resources.

In the popular Hindi movie Chak De India, coach tells his main players on the eve of the final match that their opponent must have studied their infighting and would exploit it in the game. The Chinese analyst seems to have noticed the Indian weakness. Therefore, there is nothing alarming as such in what the Chinese scholar seems to have predicted. It is up to the Indian planners, scholarship and media as to how they read it. They can create more noise about it, register protest and promote nationalism or introspect on how to cement the cracks. After all, history is evident to the saying that ‘a stitch in time saves nine’.