At least 20 Indian Army personnel were killed in violent face-off in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, news agency ANI quoted government sources as saying. Multiple sources had earlier confirmed that the casualty figure was much more than three on the Indian side.
In the morning, the Army said India lost an officer and two soldiers during the violent face-off, while there were casualties on the Chinese side as well. The extent of casualties on the Chinese side is not immediately clear. The officer killed in the clash is Colonel Santosh Babu, Commanding Officer of the 16 Bihar regiment, while the two soldiers were K Palani and OJha, sources said.
It has historically been a difficult topic to address — the 1962 Indo-China War, India’s dubious record in terms of the origins of the conflict, and its disastrous performance during the war itself (the bravery of our unsupported, ill-equipped jawans notwithstanding).
Addressed it must be, if only to prevent a similarly ostrich-in-the-sand mentality from taking over India’s perspective on the China question in the 21st century, more than 50 years since the two sides came to blows in the Himalayas.
China’s modern innings begins only with the end of the Chinese Civil War, which followed World War II and ended in 1949. Mao’s communists eventually drove Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists onto the island of Taiwan (where their descendants thrive awkwardly today). In 1966, Mao commenced his “Cultural Revolution”, which is a polite way of describing a barbaric and seemingly mindless defenestration of the flower of Chinese society.
It was a genocide of intellectuals, artists, authors and anyone with the mildest of political opinions. I admit to being rather mystified by this back when I first studied it. It seemed like such an own-goal, such a totally disastrous and counterproductive period in Chinese history that it barely survived logical examination. I think differently today but more on that later.
Let us consider the true rise of China starting in the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, during which decade incidentally both India and China “liberalised” their economies and societies and joined a global system underwritten by America and the West.
China’s approach — in hindsight — seems to consist of a purely tactical, instrumental use of global systems of finance, trade, politics and law to further its short to medium term goals of rapid economic, industrial and technological development.
The Chinese relationship with global institutions, values and norms was purely one of convenience, transaction, relative power and pragmatic calculation. The Chinese are entirely unaffected, and unfettered, by the underlying “norms, values and ethics” that Western societies, and West-authored global institutions are supposed to be based upon and are expressing.
