https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2020/06/18/the-moonlight-massacre
Without a single shot fired, at least 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops killed each other in scarcely believable hand-to-hand combat in the Himalayas on Monday, earlier this week. Capping several recent standoffs along high altitude borders - including at least one other episode of physical battery - the incident in Ladakh signals a new era of tensions between the two giant civilization-states. 58 years ago in 1962, they fought a bloody campaign in these same mountains, which ended only after an unilateral cease-fire was declared by Zhou Enlai. Yet, despite significant disputes along 2500 miles of contiguous territory (for instance, China claims the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh) there have been no armed hostilities between the neighbours for almost five decades. Their 1996 bilateral agreement explicitly forbids "guns or explosives within two kilometers of the Line of Actual Control." But that wasn't enough to ensure peace in the Galwan valley. Incomplete reports indicate pushing and shoving led to an Indian officer plummeting to his death. Then a brutal free-for-all in the dark : fists, rocks, iron rods, and crude clubs studded with barbed wire. Several soldiers appear to have been summarily executed, thrown from the heights. This is very bad news, coming at an especailly awful juncture, as the global coronavirus emergency continues unabated. Just this week, Beijing cancelled over 1200 flights, and closed schools all over again. The city spokesman Xu Hejian said, "the epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe." Meanwhile, India is one of the worst-hit countries. Covid-19 has already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in New Delhi and Mumbai. According to the Institute of Mathematical Studies, there are likely to be a million active cases by mid-July. By that point, the country will run out of ICU beds. The state of the economy is even worse. A new report published by Ganesh Rao, Praveen Ravi and Vishnu Padmanabhan says 139 million Indians (30% of the urban population) will run out of savings over the next two weeks. Now, in frightful pandemic circumstances, they will find it very difficult to meet even the most essential expenditures. Why now? Why would India and China tango with the prospect of war over remote, largely desolate terrain on the "roof of the world"? The answer - only too predictably - lies in misguided, ultimately meaningless geopolitics. As policy expert Bruno Maçães summarized on Twitter, "China is trying to impress upon India that it should abandon its plans to oppose Chinese power (inter alia by aligning more closely with US or Japan, or by attracting manufacturing away from China). Risky strategy, but it could still work..." The strident propaganda/disinformation tabloid *Global Times *(the English-language subsidiary of the Communist Party-owned *People's Daily*) confirms this view. After Ladakh, it wrote, "this is what the US, which is grappling with both internal and external troubles, wants to see. The US strongly desires emerging hotspots in other places of the world to distract media attention from the spreading COVID-19 epidemic and anti-racism unrest that are plaguing the country." *Global Times* also warned, "The US wants to woo New Delhi and create an illusion that India has the back (sic) of the US and other Western countries. Some hawkish forces in India have become increasingly impulsive and irrational in provoking conflict with China, partly resulting from US instigation and encouragement...The US will exploit every possible chance to encourage India to act on US interests, but chess pieces manipulated by the US may not achieve what they hope for." There will be no easy retreat to the previous status quo. Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cautions "Sino-Indian relations can never go back to the old normal. They will reset with greater competitiveness and in ways that neither country had actually intended at the beginning of the crisis." All this is an uncanny reminder of the tortuous 19th and early 20th century intrigues perpetrated by Britain throughout the Himalayan region right up to Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect India from the expansionist Russian Empire (it's the backdrop for Rudyard Kipling's classic novel, *Kim*). Immense resources were squandered, and huge numbers of lives lost in covert operations, and two Anglo-Afghan wars in addition to two Anglo-Sikh wars. One of the main reasons China eventually wound up occupying and annexing Tibet (thus creating its contentious frontier with India) is the British invasion of the country in 1903, which forced the Dalai Lama to flee to Mongolia, and then to Beijing. From that point on, Chinese rulers have perceived the Himalayan borders with India as the potential source of existential threats. But here's the disgraceful bottom line: historians have proven Russia never wanted to invade India. All those machinations were for nothing, all the justifications entirely bogus. Leaders lied, and countless people died for nothing. Will it happen again, now? -- #2, Second Floor, Navelkar Trade Centre, Panjim, Goa Cellphone 9326140754
