NEW DELHI: China is teaching South Indian languages such as Tamil and Malayalam to wireless radio operators of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The move is to understand intercepts of communication signals of the Indian armed forces deployed along the 3,500 km Line of Actual Control and the international border.
The PLA’s emphasis is more on the spoken aspects of these two South Indian languages, which help facilitate faster communication by the Indian Army. “No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages being extremely difficult for any person to comprehend without a working knowledge of these languages,” officials privy to the inputs said.
The Pakistani experience, according to sources, has taught China to learn to understand Tamil, Malayalam and a few other South Indian languages. “During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, our radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces. The Pakistanis were foxed by our Tamil and Malayalam-speaking radio operators,” said an official.
“China does not want to repeat the mistake by its all weather friend Pakistan during the 1971 war,” said an intelligent official.
PLA operatives’ understanding of South Indian languages will additionally help Beijing in gathering intelligence from Tamil-dominated pockets in Northeastern Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had a considerable sway till 2009 before being decimated by the forces of the island nation. China has a deal with Sri Lanka for majority control of Hambantota port in its southeast.
Indian forces such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which guards the Indo-China border, is also training its new troops in Mandarin, the language of mainland China.
Changing Frequency Chinese wireless radio operators are learning Tamil and Malayalam to understand intercepts of the Indian Army
No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages
During the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, Indian radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces