The traditional India-China-Pakistan tensions continue to go up and down, reminding the nations concerned and the larger world that they cannot be wished away. After the Uri surgical strike in 2016, Doklam in 2017 and Galwan in 2020, any talk of tensions along India’s land borders, including the latest clash at the Arunachal Pradesh border, have begun throwing up visions of an impending war. Analyses about China’s Xi Jinping acquiring an additional five-year term and a team of his choice have only strengthened such apprehensions.
One side of this near-eternal flashpoint is North Korea’s ballistic missile launches, which India, too, condemned. Of course, the four-nation Quad Malabar exercise off the Japanese coast was planned long before this. This was followed by an exercise minus India plus Canada in those waters. The message from the two exercises was definitely for China.
Though China sending in Yuan Wang VI into the Indian Ocean when India had scheduled a missile test should not be linked, the earlier despatch of Yuan Wang V to Sri Lanka’s Hambantota was not innocent either. It may not be as serious a concern as China’s bullying of Taiwan and its power play in the South and East China Sea neighbourhoods, but there is a purpose after all.
By escalating bilateral tensions through Doklam and Galwan, after expecting India to lower its guard through the informal Xi-Modi summits at Wuhan in 2018 and Mahabalipuram in 2019, China has only revived and reinforced India’s suspicions about that country. Former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale’s observation: “We deal with China as a threat when it is a threat, and an opportunity when it is one”, may sound over-optimistic on Indian streets though that is the functional reality.
If someone thought that all of India’s immediate tensions were centred on itself, its immediate neighbours, and on Taiwan and North Korea, it is not so. Going beyond Pakistan, real trouble seems to be brewing, not very far away, in Iran.
Whether it was a part of his poll campaign near home or as a part of the post-Cold war American geo-strategic and geopolitical priority for “democratising” the world with the West’s version of “liberal ways”, US President Joe Biden’s declaration to “free Iran” is loaded with possibilities.
The Iranian Revolution (1978) and the hostage crisis the very next year hurt the all-American pride like no other until 9/11. In a new world where the US wants to reassert its authority and reclaim its pride in the Gulf-Arab region a decade after eliminating Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda, Iranian women’s anti-hijab protests seem to have provided the opportunity or excuse for the US President to talk about Tehran. As if to rub salt in the wound on the reverse, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a religious scholar like his seven predecessors, referred to the Iranian Revolution and left it almost at that. Charging the US and Saudi Arabia with conspiracy in the matter, Tehran threatened to “retaliate”.
All this at a time when America’s western allies had not given up hope that Biden’s victory over Donald Trump would help reset the global clock on Iran for the better. They were hoping that they could sit with Tehran to re-work the deal to end Iran’s ambitions of acquiring nuclear weapons through peaceful, negotiated means.
What makes the current Iranian situation bad, or from bad to worse, is the presence of relative peace elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Though under the ‘despicable’ Taliban, with its own hijab law and worse, Afghanistan is in relative peace after decades of war, violence and non-governance. Biden’s talk about freeing Iran from the hijab ban and by extension, the ruling mullahs, can sound uncomfortable and unwelcome in Afghanistan. And any fresh trouble in Afghanistan or Iran can affect peace in the region. India will not be left out.
This is not to mention the relative quiet in the rest of West Asia, even if like the graveyard kind. Israel continues to poke and provoke Palestinians to secure itself, but there has been a near-nil regional or global reaction in recent months and years. Syria, where a multilateral war was raging, has been silent for some time. The IS, though not out, is down, just for now. This is as far as the situation in the west of India and South Asia goes.
All these old and new tensions are again building up around India, with the Tawang crisis, or not too far away from India, with the Ukraine war raging on. There is no sight of an early end, militarily or through negotiations. Though the economic fallout of the war has been global, with the Third World’s post-Covid recovery affected, the war itself has become more or less localised.
In the decades after the Second World War, the West ensured that wars did not hit their gates, or so it seemed. Looking closely at every major war, even those that did not involve India-China and India-Pakistan were inching closer to the subcontinent. There was the Korean War (1950–53), followed by the longish Vietnam War (1955–75), the Iranian Revolution (1978–79), the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–89), and the two Gulf Wars (in 1990–91 and 2003–11 respectively)—each of them bringing military tensions closer to India.
The world has understood the Cold War as an unfought battle between two nations perceived as equals. Post-Cold War, there have been multiple flashpoints and firing lines where the not-so-benign presence of the US, whether direct or by proxy, can be felt.
Instead, the US seems to be keen on keeping the world unipolar, the attempt having failed once after the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and Islamic terrorism refused to behave as anticipated.
Yes, China has to be stopped on its track to acquire superpower status, but NATO and India should tell the US that this “unfinished task” should be its main agenda. Any deviation would have independent consequences for other regions of the world, beginning with Asia/South Asia, where India’s concerns and consequences would only mount.
N Sathiya Moorthy
Policy analyst and political commentator