In no doubt about India

And China has a clear idea about India — that it is a potential nuisance. It views us as one of the ‘claws of the crab’ — the crab is the US whose aim is to contain China; a crab with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia and India as its claws. The recent moves for closer relationship between the US and India, advantageous though they are for us, have had the incidental effect of reinforcing this perception.

Accordingly, China has pursued a consistent strategy of containing India in return, of keeping it confined to, and busy in South Asia.

With this aim, it has given aid to Pakistan for all sorts of purposes — including the development of atomic weapons and acquisition of missile technology. And it has a long tradition of doing so. Recall the counsel of The Wiles of War, “Murder with a borrowed knife” — that is, instead of doing anything overtly aggressive yourself, find the entity that is naturally predisposed to do your enemy down; arm it. China has entered into a military pact with Bangladesh. There have been reports of its offering to build an atomic reactor for Bangladesh. Myanmar is a dependency of China. In fact, the largest supplies of Chinese arms go to four countries in our region — Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Iran.

Tibet has been militarised — to put the Tibetans down, no doubt; but only to put them down? China has redoubled its efforts in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles and Mauritius. It already has access to the ports of Myanmar — from which it has also taken on lease the Coco Islands just 30 miles from the Andamans. Now it is helping build and it thus acquires access to deep-sea ports round us: Chittagong in Bangladesh and Gwadar in Pakistan — the latter alone at a cost of $ 3 billion. It is also upgrading the naval base in Omara for Pakistan. Along with constructing the port at Gwadar, it is building highways that will link Gwadar to locations within Pakistan but also to Urumchi in China. The most consequential of this string of ‘initiatives’ is the project to dredge Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River — this is to be done by Chinese engineers and much Chinese labour. It isn’t just that a good proportion of this workforce will stay on in or around the new facilities. Once the project is completed, China will acquire a useable waterway giving direct access from its Yunnan province to the Bay of Bengal...

... contd.