Some good points were made in those posts.
Just to expand on a few points and add some context.
India’s entire foreign policy is dominated by its one-sided obsession with China, and a toxic mixture of Hindu ultranationalism and deflective popularism.
India doesn’t need more nukes to ‘deter’ China because quite frankly, China doesn’t care enough about India to want to waste the time or effort to screw with it in the first place.
While India might see itself as the rising star destined to surpass China, China just doesn’t seem any evidence to be unduly worried about India to the point of feeling the need to try to curtail its development like America is trying to do to China.
All India needs to do to not be threatened by China is literally nothing. It does not even need to sort out the boarder dispute because China is not actively looking to change the status quo or even apply any pressure to resolve the dispute. Remember that these boarder disputes have existed since they birth of the two nations, but it’s only flared up under the reigns of specific Indian leaders. When Indian leaders didn’t go out of their way to stir up trouble with China along the boarder, the boarder was quiet and peaceful. Fancy that!
However, India cannot help but actively provoke China with petty and meaningless boarder clashes because of a number of factors, all of which are entirely of India’s own making.
Firstly, the Indian ultranationalism that is so central to Modi’s domestic political success demands results that they can be nationalistic about.
When India fails to deliver anything even their fanboys could cheer about through normal development (again, largely due to China’s fault in the eyes of Hindu ultras. If only China didn’t ‘fake’ its GDP growth figures to always outshine India!), Modi’s political instincts are to create big splashy events to divert attention and shore up his own flagging support.
I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that Doklam happened not long after the spectacular Indian own goal of abolishing two of India’s most widely used banknotes almost overnight; and Ladakh happened soon after the abolition of Kashmir’s special statics and Indians bungled initial COVID19 response and growing crisis.
Modi’s political instincts are to use deflective populism by creating foreign crisis that he can present as ‘wins’ domestically to divert attention when he wets the bed through his own incompetence and is facing a growing public backlash.
This dovetails with India’s general deflective populism of blaming everything wrong under the sun on China (Chinese trained locusts anyone?), which while great at absolving Indian governments of all responsibility for their own failures, does create pressure to ‘respond’ to all those made up slights and ‘attacks’ by China over time.
To compound the problem, India also have a weird congestive dissonance when it comes to how it sees the boarder dispute with China, and China’s strategic intentions towards India.
On the one hand, Indian pride would not let them see the truth of just how lowly they are on both the Chinese government and general populous’ threat and priority list, and they always seem to assume that China frets about India as much as India worries about China.
But at the same time, they seem to think that Chinese boarder conflicts are an issue over resources and greed for China, and that if they can raise the cost of maintaining the boarder conflict beyond some magical number, that China will just say, ‘nah, this just isn’t profitable enough to be worth my while anyone’ and somehow just quit.
That is a major reason as to why India is so irrationally sensitive towards Chinese infrastructure building near the boarder (I mean, when China has high speed rail linking boarder regions to the Chinese heartland, how much difference would a few miles of tarmac over existing dirt roads really make?). It makes no rational sense from a strategic or tactical point of view, because those infrastructure improvements doesn’t really change things much in war time. What it would do is help to greatly reduce peacetime troop maintenance costs for supplying troops garrisoning boarder regions, which is the real reason India objects, because it feels that moving the cost dial the other way and further for their magical target cost.
Again, this explains why India keeps seeking to provoke petty and meaningless boarder clashes with China. Because every time they do, it costs China a lot of money to redeploy all those combat forces to the Indian boarder, and to maintain new garrisons.
In a sense, you can see that at some level Indians realise how stacked the odds are against them, that is why they are so desperate to exploit any and all perceived moments of weakness with China, as deep down, the know that the only way they can gain an edge is through outside factors, and even then only temporarily, which explains their tendency to dive head first into trouble at the first opportunity.
Modi thought he had a historic chance with COVID19 and Trump’s open hostility towards China. That was the reason for the Indian incursions plain and simple.
The plan was to simply probe and pull back if they encountered more push back from China and/or less support from the US than expected.
To be fair to Modi, it would have been a rather forgettable and even routine clash had the dead colonel not gone rouge on him after both sides agreed a mutual withdrawal.
But the dead colonel did demonstrate just how easily and quickly things could get out of hand when you play stupid games with opposing armies and:
-don’t have ultimate escalation advantage;
-didn’t do the necessary prep work to get forces deployed and ready at the boarder as tensions rose;
-didn’t have anything like the international support you thought you might enjoy.
-and don’t have the means (including bare basics like Ammo and sleeping bags apparently) to actually put up a fight, never mind expect to win it.
Where it not for China actually going out of its way to allow Modi to get out his ladder to climb down with, we might have already had a repeat of 62, only with an even more one-sided victory for China and much more damage Don’t to India.
