DHAKA FIGHTING A PROXY WAR FOR INDIA? India mobilises force along China border M. Shahidul Islam Faced with what could become a chilled political winter amidst a series of insider-exposures of pre-election deals with the country's military establishment, and, of 'criminal connivance' of some ruling party leaders in the BDR massacre of February 25-26, the AL-led regime has another mammoth task that could define its political future for ever. That undertaking involves re-shaping of the regional geopolitical landscape and the role Bangladesh must play as a sovereign nation, at a time when tension along China-India border attains a war pitch. The government must also answer why the country's security forces are routinely massacring the so called Marxist-Leninists across the length and breadth of the nation, something the rights watchers claim to constitute naked violation of human rights and urges not to go unchallenged for too long. Some of those groups even accuse Bangladesh of fighting a proxy war for India. Chinese linkage While the nation remains in the dark with respect to what exactly has sparked this killing spree of Marxists-Leninists by security forces, a deeper look into the policy dynamics indicates the move being inextricably linked with an emerging creed of an 'Anti- Red - Terror' drive in Delhi which seems to have supplanted India's previously held priority against the so called 'Anti- Green- Terror' drive against forces of political Islam, or runs in parallel. Hence, all indications reveal the decision by our security forces to recklessly kill so many Marxist-Leninist stemming from a regional power game in which India is desperately trying to reshape the geopolitical landscape of the region with unfettered Western blessing. The boon for India comes from endorsements from the gullible NATO allies who view China as an emerging 'Red Threat' while the Indian intelligence believes China is trying desperately to severe India's North Eastern regions from the mainland by helping various radical left groups and other secessionist forces. Some recently leaked Indian intelligence reports, rumoured to have been leaked deliberately, claim Beijing is training and financing the People Liberation Army (PLA) of Manipur, the ULFA separatists of Assam, Kachin rebels of Myanmar, and a host of other Naga and Mizo separatist outfits. All these groups operate along our own borders. That is part of the danger we face. More ominously, the leaked reports implicate Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar of aiding and abetting those terrorist outfits in their territories and depict an emerging danger of 'Red Terror' from the combined military prowess being displayed by Marxist-Leninists in neighbouring countries, allegedly in concert with other North-Eastern separatists of India, with Chinese blessing and patronage. Covert missions That has made the sea change in Delhi's policy stances too conspicuous to ignore. Despite having financed and patronized the Tamil separatists for decades, Delhi began to view, in some of those leaked reports, the LTTE too from an inimical perspective due to emerging China fear: One of the outcome of some of those reports being a radical decision to decimate the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in March this year, only days prior to Indian general election. The spark to that decisive moment came from another report that claimed that China has sold six battle tanks to the Tamil guerrillas which Indian intelligence had spotted while landing along the Sri Lankan coast. The incident ended up with a devastating consequence for the Tamil guerrillas who had tenaciously withstood Sri Lankan armed forces for over 25 years. According to reliable sources, a brigade strong special force of India has made physical intervention in Sri Lanka in March to dismantle the Tamil separatists. Following that, another brigade of Indian special force allegedly conducted a special operation in the Swat valley of Pakistan's North East in May, Prior to those two revealing events, allegedly a small segment of 21 special force fighters of India had neutralized the border forces of Bangladesh (BDR) by instigating a barbaric carnage in February while a brigade strong Indian special force stood ready along the border to intervene, if needed. Sources say Pakistani authorities have discovered dead bodies of Indian special force members in the Swat valley following the May encounters in which leading Taliban commanders died. Dead bodies of Indian special force members were also discovered after the Sri Lankan offensive in March. Meanwhile, some irrefutable evidence has unearthed lately of participation of Indian special force in the BDR mutiny of February 2009. Experts believe, through such covert operations, Delhi wanted to send some dire messages to India's smaller neighbours in order to be able to focus singularly on China, resulting, over the last three months, generation of intense war hysteria within various Indian establishments while the Indian military went onto beefing up its force capability along the Chinese frontiers by reinforcing two squadrons of Su-MKI advanced fighter jets, each consisting of 18 aircraft, to its air base at Tezpur, 150 km south of the Chinese border. At the same time, construction works to upgrade at least five airfields in the Arunachal Pradesh for simultaneous uses by air force fighters and transport aircrafts have been finalized while two new army divisions, with some 30,000 soldiers, have been raised for deployment in the 90,000-sq-km Arunachal Pradesh, which has a 4,000-km border with the Chinese-occupied Tibet. Earlier in June, the provincial governor of Arunachal Pradesh, Joginder Jaswant Singh, who is also a former chief of the Indian army, announced that the two army divisions of about 30,000 men will be deployed along the Chinese border, joining the 90,000 already there. Reports say, that planned deployment has completed recently while many other aggressive postures of India had made bilateral relations further worse. For instance, On September 10, China accused India of diplomatic protocol breaching and spying due to Delhi's decision to inspect the cargo of a China-bound UAE flight. Amidst such military build ups, the situation is getting tenser by the day, and, unlike in the past, the gravity of the situation is being acknowledged by responsible quarters in Delhi and Beijing. India's chairman of the chiefs of staff committee, Admiral Suresh Mehta, acknowledged recently the brewing trouble at the Chinese frontiers and said, 'It is quite evident coping with China will certainly be one of our primary challenges in years ahead. Our deficit trust with China can never be liquidated unless our boundary problems are resolved.' Global blue print Some experts claim that the Indian moves are linked with a global blue print devised in early 2000 by ultra-conservative hawks from Washington, Delhi and Tel Aviv in concert with the neo-con advisers of former Bush administration to re-shape the global geopolitical landscape. Unfortunately, no other region has paid more heavily as a result of that global scheme's implementation, as did the Mid-East and South Asia. In South Asia, Pakistan is undergoing a fratricidal warfare while another Muslim predominant nation, Bangladesh, has witnessed a naked conspiracy to bring certain political forces to power at any cost. Meanwhile, in order to circumvent the major Chinese ally in the region, Pakistan, New Delhi has facilitated the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 by aiding militarily the so called Northern forces and has been one of the trusted allies of Afghan President Hamid Karzai ever since. Further a field, India has leased and built an air force and an army base at Farkhor in Tajikistan to watch over Chinese activities in that region as the US influence began to wane in the follow up to the Afghan invasion in 2001. Sources say when India undertook a mission to build another military outpost in Mongolia, in the northern tip of China, Beijing took it as a grand move to encircle the Chinese Republic from all fronts and increased its military patrols along the China- India border. However, the fundamental problem with that global blue print was in identifying the real ideological enemy. Although political Islam has been branded as the main nemesis of US, Israel and India since September 2001, Delhi faced a graver danger from the Marxists who made governance dysfunctional in more than half of the Indian states by late 2006. That is what has made it urgent to revive the historic enmity with Beijing into a war-ready pitch. In recent months, India claimed that China is in occupation of approximately 38,000 sq. km of Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir, and, under the so-called China-Pakistan Boundary Agreement of 1963, Pakistan had ceded 5,180 sq. km. of Indian territory in Pakistani Occupied Kashmir to China. Delhi claims, in totality, approximately 90,000 sq. km. of Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh and about 2000 sq. km. in the mid- sector of the India-China boundary is under Chinese occupation. Beijing, on the other hand, has always insisted that it does not recognize the Arunachal Pradesh, resulting in a protracted stalemate in which neither side reconciled with the claims of the other. The border between the two nations has never been officially delimited due to such intransigence from both sides. McMahon Line Besides, since the creation of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, not a single Chinese government recognized the British imposed McMahon Line that divides the two nuclear-armed Asian giants, which Beijing terms as a symbol of imperialist aggression. However, in recent months, the Arunachal Pradesh dispute has become China's most intractable border issue with India, prompting many experts to fear that it could trigger an armed conflict sooner. That fear is not unplaced. In 1962, the two Asian powers went to war over disputed 3,500 km border, which ended in China occupying much of the Himalayan high ground which Delhi traditionally considered as strategic buffer against invasion from the north. Delhi is now determined to turn the tide in its favour, with NATO backing. Besides, Delhi is playing hard ball with Beijing using the Tibetan exiled leader Dalai Lama as a potent political card. That is why, in the midst of such an explosive situation, Dalai Lama is being sent in early November to the Tawang Buddhist temple located in the disputed territory of Indian- occupied Arunachal Pradesh. As anticipated, the Chinese reaction to that planned visit was very terse. When asked about the visit, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said, 'China expresses strong concern about this information. The visit further reveals the Dalai clique's anti-China and separatist essence.' Observers say the Chinese anger is palpable. Exiled in India since 1959, Dalai Lama said in 2008, "I believe Arunachal Pradesh is Indian territory." Although India had stopped the Dalai Lama from visiting Tawang a number of times in the past, the official patronage from Delhi to the upcoming visit is viewed by experts as a deliberate move to antagonize Beijing further. Economic fall out Economically, the latest building of tension has put in jeopardy the booming economic interactions between the two Asian giants and poses a grave threat to the economic growth of the entire region. Since the mid-1990s, China became India's biggest trading partner, the value of bilateral deals reaching $60 billion by now, a 30-time-fold increase since 2000. Yet, as Delhi seems poised to sacrifice its economic dividends for anticipated geopolitical boon by upping the ante, the consequences for other small nations of the region of this dangerous game is anybody's guess. For Bangladesh in particular, the Marxist card needs to be played with caution and any reckless action in this context should be put on hold. |
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