Abhijit Bhattacharyya | 61 years after 1962, be alert for fresh Chinese mischief

Sixty-one years have gone since October 20, 1962, when Communist China’s founder and overlord launched the Sino-Indian war, with the primary objective of humiliating India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, known across the world as an apostle of peace, non-violence, harmony and a “live-and-let-live” practitioner of the post-Western imperialism era of the Third World. As a disciple and the chosen successor of Mahatma Gandhi, there could not be a bigger contrast between Nehru and Mao, who was held responsible for millions of deaths on his long march to power in Beijing in 1949.

Democratic India was a symbol of hope to the newly-free nations of Asia and Africa, while the People’s Republic of China was a pariah state led by a hostile muscleman of murderous ideology, who had fought against the United Nations in Korea and had brutally invaded and conquered an independent and peaceful Tibet, driving the Dalai Lama into exile in India. The contrast between New Delhi’s democratic PM and the Dragon’s autocratic ruler was so stark that Mao had to prove himself as a “true” “Son of Heaven” and look beyond the Hwang Ho valley into the sub-Himalayan terrain.

In 1962’s aftermath, Mao’s evil designs are now in the public domain. The archives reveal that “a meeting took place in Beijing between Mao and a group of Naxal leaders from India in December 1967”. Mao “would have ended the border dispute with India by returning the land south of the McMahon Line if a ‘people’s government’ had come to power in New Delhi”. This and many such suggestions were made by the Communist Party of China’s head, who claimed he didn’t want the 90,000 sq km but for the “capitalist and feudal government” in India.

Li Danhui, of East China Norma University, who had access to the Chinese archives, reveals this little-known important piece of history: “Because India is an imperialist, feudal and bureaucrat-capitalist government, China had to fight for every inch of land and had been using dilatory tactics in dealing with the issue”. Clearly, the objective was to destroy Nehru and bring him down.

As the current “core leader” of the CPC, Chairman Xi Jinping, is a self-proclaimed re-incarnate of Mao, it would be useful to peruse what his demigod (Mao Zedong) had to say in 1938, with utter contempt about the political systems which didn’t toe, or fall in line with, the CPC’s autocratic brand of criminality: “China’s war of resistance was an extraordinary spectacle in the history of warfare. It would in the future influence not only the fate of China and Japan; it would also surge forward the progress of all countries, and in particular of oppressed peoples such as India, to march forward” (Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume II).

The point today is that due to the monumental folly of a sizeable chunk of gullible and ignorant Indians’ obsession with China and addiction to all things Chinese, the ship of the Indian State is slowly but steadily sailing on to the doomed rocks. If territory was the prime target of Mao in 1962, multiple lip-smacking lucrative economic, commercial and money-spinning ventures are on CPC boss Xi Jinping’s radar in 2023.

Today, the Xi brigade’s main mission is to ensure that “Delhi must be destroyed”. Virtually all countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, big and small, are being lured to pay obeisance at Mr Xi’s court. One of the key exceptions is India, which stands defiant despite a humongous $100 billion-plus trade deficit, the erosion of automobile industry caused by the CPC’s companies, humiliating and irreversible territorial losses, the addiction of India’s cost-conscious customers to cheap

Chinese-made phones and a variety of electronic devices and the destruction of industry by a sizeable number of import-loving traders who collude and connive with CPC-sponsored agent provocateurs in the guise of merchants.

Despite this gloomy scenario, however, there’s also glimmer of hope. India’s much-maligned law enforcement agencies are rendering yeoman’s service to the nation on the China front. Court filings by the Enforcement Directorate reveals that “Rs 1.07 trillion (about $13 billion) have been remitted outside India by Chinese company Vivo to trading companies controlled by its Chinese parent… masking layers, intended to escape the Government of India’s notice”. “While no profits are shown from 2014-15 to 2019-20 in statutory filings and no income-tax paid, huge sums siphoned off out of India”, in July 2022 alone, the ED estimated a figure of Rs 624.7 billion ($7.5 billion) remitted abroad, mainly to China.

Vivo, however, is just the tip of the CPC’s criminal gang iceberg in India. Although the Indian media does occasionally refer to chronic Chinese shenanigans, a Western media outfit put it much more starkly: “Inside the deadly loan apps that blackmail with nudes: the Chinese-masterminded blackmail scam is using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across India”. The Chinese criminals not only make billions but are also killing Indians inside their homes. How will the CPC’s overlord react if the same thing happened in reverse direction?

At a time when Mr Xi is being assiduously wooed and re-cultivated by German carmakers and other European businessmen desperate to boost exports and their governments, and a battery of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet members and senior officials are making repeated pilgrimages to the Dragon’s court in Beijing, will the arrest of Vivo’s top Chinese executives and their associates in India re-ignite the flames? Will the Chinese make renewed attempts to hammer New Delhi with multiple assaults to cripple its finances, economy, trade, commerce and hit it hard diplomatically in front of its South Asian neighbours through more posturing at the sub-Himalayan frontier?

At a time when President Biden himself is looking ahead to a face-to-face meeting with President Xi at the landmark Apec summit in the United States next month, India is “rocking the Chinese boat” by arresting their nationals for illegally making billions for a Beijing state enterprise run by the CPC as its personal fiefdom! This, when Mr Xi considers he’s at the cusp of determining and “shaping the destiny of mankind” along with Mr Biden in San Francisco in November?

The strategy of Xi Jinping is clear. He feels he is a “worthy torch-bearer” of the late Chairman Mao to take on India because that’s the last bastion standing in the way between the Dragon Emperor and a large part of the world falling head over heels at his feet!