Shankar Roychowdhury

Jun 28, 2011

Beware of the tiger on the mountaintop

The People’s Republic of China has once again hammered home to India its inflexible hardline on the status of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, considered by China to be their “lost territory” of Xhang Nan or Southern Tibet. A Chinese visa was recently refused to a senior Indian Air Force officer, a Group Captain from Arunachal Pradesh, proceeding to China as a member of an Indian defence delegation, on the grounds that being a resident of Arunachal Pradesh the concerned officer was actually a Chinese citizen and hence did not require a visa.

Delhi to Dhaka, with love

Looking back in the 40th year of independence of Bangladesh, the War of Liberation in 1971 in what was then East Pakistan can be militarily encapsulated into two stages, first as a predominantly low-intensity conflict of insurgency and terrorism by the Mukti Bahini, from around April to December of that year, and the next as a decisive, high-intensity conflict of two weeks, from December 3-16, in which the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force participated in support of the ongoing freedom struggle.

Friendless in Afghanistan

It is widely acknowledged that as the date for the American troop pullout in 2014 approaches, Pakistan’s concerns with securing Afghanistan as an area of “strategic depth” against India is intensifying and acquiring urgency. Support for their proxy allies, the Taliban, is being stepped up to “shape the battlefield environment” inside Afghanistan to Pakistan’s advantage prior to and during the run-up to the multi-lateral negotiations, so as to exercise maximum pressure in the hiatus that will precede and follow the withdrawal of American and other international forces.

The Nuclear Rubicon

The recent announcement by Pakistan regarding successful trials of its tactical nuclear weapon (TNW), the short-range (60 km) nuclear capable Hatf-9 — or Al Nasr — missile comes at a time when events in AfPak as well as inside Pakistan remain in uneasy equilibrium. It introduces an additional and potentially destabilising new factor into the Indo-Pak matrix.