Ladakh Flash Point

Bright Sword said:

Nobonita,
Actually I forgot to add that the additional advantages the rationalists in India tout are the following;
1. Due to cultural and linguistic affinity business relationships are easier and India could offer investment in Pakistan.
(Note: Nobody buys this really. The Urdu Hindi split has drifted so far apart with respective Sankritization and Persianisation that Indian and Pakistanis on the rare occasions they do talk need interpreters to translate. The current Defense Minister Rajnath Singh took an interpreter with him to Pakistan when he visited the country as Home Minister. Likewise Modi had an interpreter when he visited Pakistan briefly, We don't know if the interpreter s translate from Urdu to Hindi or Gujarati to English.).
2. Peace with Pakistan will allow unfettered access to Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia and the Middle East for Indian goods and business.
(Note: The RSS agrees except that they want a conquered territory that was once "Pakistan ". )
3. More Wild Cards ( comical). Pakistanis could perhaps be persuaded to change their dietary habits, and renounce eating beef because this offensive to Hindus. This would profoundly improve Indian internal security where beef and cow slaughter are causes for repetitive violence such what happened in Bulundshahar UP. in 2018.,
( Note: A sizable section of secular Bangladeshis were deeply grateful for Indian help in their struggle for independence and in 1972 were advocating a reunion and accession with India. Bangladesh badly needed assistance in reconstruction and security following the civil war and they looked to India for economic assistance. For India it was a bonus. The "chickens neck" would no longer be a factor and would have access to its North Eastern states right up to Burma with the ultimate prize being the port of Chittagong, In fact like Sikkim in 1975 the Instrument of Accession was nearly signed. This never happened for a variety of reasons the most important of which was the fact that the politically powerful elite in Calcutta felt they would be swamped into a minority, They resisted the merger. On the Bangladeshi side India's modest demand that Bangladeshis agree to a
a beef ban was greeted with derision.
It was early 1972 when these negotiations were going on with the Indian army still in Dhaka even though now mainly in the barracks with their Bangladeshi allies controlling most of the city. Whether as an act of defiance or not is unknown as of today but the Bangladeshi officers did hold a grand barbecue party "in honor" of their allies. The Indian officers attended sampling only the drinks and snacks.
In any case the accession which would have completely changed the strategic calculus for India's North East today never happened. )

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plawolf said:

Ironically, if India were to peacefully resolve its territorial disputed with Pakistan and China

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plawolf said:

Ironically, if India were to peacefully resolve its territorial disputed with Pakistan and China

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Nobonita Barua said:

There is no irony. India is a fake country that never should have been born to begin with.

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plawolf said:

On the contrary, if India was stupid enough to offer Pakistan Kashmir in exchange for cancelling CPEC and downgrading relations with China, I think Pakistan would snap Indian’s hand o/QUOTE]

At this point all your points are valid. Looking back.
Some Indian governments in a bygone era ( I.K. Gujral 1996 and MMS 2010) had attempted to wean Pakistan away from China by building interest groups ( "Peace Desire, Twin Track diplomacy) emphasizing cultural and linguistic affinity ( which in fact has faded further apart than mainland Mandarin Chinese verses Traditional Chinese in Taiwan).It didn't work ( Bollywood, and Cricket included). Today the peoples are further apart culturally linguistically ( and of course religiously ) than ever before with even ex-pat Indians and Pakistanis maintaining their distance when they are in an airport transfer lobby on a common flight. Pakistanis are turning to Central Asia, Turkey and Iran for a cultural anchor.
In short;
1. The cultural anchor is no longer relevant despite the dreams of the Indian peace groups.
2. Theoretically India has huge advantages if somehow Pakistan and Bangladesh could be co-opted. This is even greater than the Taiwan China reunification.
4. The ONLY reason Pakistan will consider India's offer will be when Indian military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Pakistan becomes unbearable. So Pakistan will break from China like Egypt broke from the Soviet Union under similar conditions.
India would likely want joint control or demilitarization of the CPEC just as Israel while granting the Sinai and the Suez back to Egypt has ensured that the Suez is not used by belligerents to Israel and Egypt positions no military assets in Sinai other than border guards

Its a pipe dream but this IS being discussed.

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Inst said:

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I forgot to mention Guangxi, but Gansu Heilongjiang Jilin are in the bottom 4. Please be current on your statistics and don't act in fabricated outrage when someone brings them up.

Tibet, Xinjiang, and Guizhou are down in the bottom 3; China has a significant inter-provincial wealth disparity. But this was in response to another poster who overstated China's wealth; the effects of the 3:1 ratio is that Jiangsu / Zhejiang / Fujian are 5-10 years away from matching South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in terms of material prosperity, while the worst performing Chinese provinces are comparable to the best performing Indian States.



I try to avoid taking sides in nationalistic disputes; doing so is awfully vulgar and results in bad consequences. As for RoC vs Manchukuo, the RoC apparently was upgrading its military systems and had a massive superiority in manpower. Hell, even during the war, the RoC had better artillery than the Japanese, except that military corruption / factionalism prevented the RoC from actually using them with effect. A famous story goes that Stillwell was asking why the RoCA wasn't using its artillery superiority against the Japanese, to which he responded "this or that division has the best artillery in the RoCA. If we were to use it and lose it, we would no longer have the best artillery in the RoCA."



Nominally, China is about 4-5 times as strong as India economically. PPP-wise, it's about 3-4 times stronger.

But seriously, when it comes to military force, the logistics favor the Indians on a war on the border due to proximity. If say, the US and China were neighbors (and they are in a way, through the Pacific Ocean), the Chinese would never be able to defeat the United States because you'd have a larger nominal economy and a more advanced military.

However, the tyranny of distance means that Chinese materiel can be moved only a couple of hundred km by land, whereas the United States has to move its assets by sea, imposing costs and creating targets for a PLARF focused on area denial.

In the Sino-Indian case, Tibet is a relatively-poorly linked frontier region, thousands of km away from China's industrial heartland. The Ladakh / Hinachal Pradesh / Sikkim / Arunachel Pradesh borders, in contrast, are closely linked to the Indian heartland, especially the Northern regions that are next to Uttar Pradesh.

The point is, China also sees a similar scenario to the EoJ and Nazi Germany insofar as it needs to get infrastructure up ASAP, because it doesn't matter how strong your military is if you can't get your military on-site; the most dangerous bases to the InA / InAF aren't in Tibet proper, they're in Xinjiang, which has the proximity to seriously threaten the Indian airforce. Likewise, when it comes to basing, the InAF has more bases facing China than China has bases facing India. This is a weakness that has to be remedied while the Indians refuse to grow up and join BRI.

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Gatekeeper said:

Wow. So you change the goalposts. What you said I'm not necessary agreeing or disagreeing with. Of course it has got nothing to do with economic size. Otherwise the US would win every single conflict it has got involved with, including Vietnam and Korea.

But the thrust of my reply was in response to your infer assertion with regards to India extra 3% growth that will surpass China's and eventually US to it's destiny as super duper power. And therefore invinciblility of it's position as the world no. 1 superpower.

Judging by your reply. You've obviously been called out on it. And unable to give a reply.

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discspinner said:

Even prior to COVID, India's growth rate had already been slowing. In fact, a former member of Modi's cabinet questioned whether growth rates between 2014 - 2018 were inflated by 2-3%. If so, India hadn't been growing much faster than 4.5 - 5% since 2014, which is not significantly higher than the 'Hindu rate of growth' of the 70s and 80s. This reality would be consistent with published employment statistics. Indeed, at a per capita GDP level of 1/5th of China, and where its nearest neighbors in the ranking of countries on this metric are Nigeria and Kenya (as of 2019), India is still unable to grow faster than China. There are many structural reasons why this is the case. Without meaningful reform, India cannot expect to raise its growth rates much higher.

So far, East Asia has been an exception to the reality of the middle income trap befalling many developing countries. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why.

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discspinner said:

Even prior to COVID, India's growth rate had already been slowing. In fact, a former member of Modi's cabinet questioned whether growth rates between 2014 - 2018 were inflated by 2-3%. If so, India hadn't been growing much faster than 4.5 - 5% since 2014, which is not significantly higher than the 'Hindu rate of growth' of the 70s and 80s. This reality would be consistent with published employment statistics. Indeed, at a per capita GDP level of 1/5th of China, and where its nearest neighbors in the ranking of countries on this metric are Nigeria and Kenya (as of 2019), India is still unable to grow faster than China. There are many structural reasons why this is the case. Without meaningful reform, India cannot expect to raise its growth rates much higher.

So far, East Asia has been an exception to the reality of the middle income trap befalling many developing countries. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why.

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