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New Delhi does alarm military planners in Beijing, but only because they foresee a situation in which India joins Washington's two "deputy sheriffs," Japan and Australia, in a U.S.-led coalition capable of taking on the People's Liberation Army on land, sea and air, should the eventuality arise. They know that the addition of India's substantial uniformed muscle could create a "second front" across the Himalayas, in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.
The Indian air force is ideally positioned -- because of its familiarity with the same advanced Russian equipment that China deploys -- to challenge its Chinese counterpart. The Indian navy would be even more lethal, denying Beijing access to oil and other resources needing to pass through the two choke points of the Straits of Hormuz and the Malacca Straits.
Small wonder that the Chinese Communist Party has instructed its most reliable allies in India, the two major communist parties, to work on distancing India from the United States. Surprisingly for those unaware of the China connection, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have threatened to bring down the Manmohan Singh government, were it to move closer to the United States in military terms.
Both parties opposed the Indian nuclear bomb as well as the 1998 nuclear tests. It is a cruel (and obvious) irony that they now oppose the India-U.S. nuclear deal on the same platform as those who oppose it because the separation of the civilian and military components of India's nuclear industry would inevitably entail a slowdown of the country's weapons build-up.
The jury is still out on whether the present U.S.-India nuclear deal can be implemented. This is due less to opposition within India than to expected resistance from the Scandinavian countries, Germany and of course China to giving India access to civilian technologies despite not having signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. But what is beyond doubt is the steady acceleration of the U.S.-India military relationship, fueled in large part by the enhanced capabilities of China in the region.
In the case of Myanmar, a country that has even less industry to power than North Korea, and which is moreover blessed with abundant oil and gas deposits, nearly a thousand nuclear scientists and technicians have gone to Russia for training. Given that there is significant and overt collaboration between North Korea and Myanmar, both of which are military allies of China, those who see the secretive junta in Yangon as a China-supported conduit for the transfer of technologies to Pyongyang may not necessarily be paranoid.
In addition, Beijing is developing Myanmar's Sittwe port as a safe harbor both for its merchantmen as well as its battleships, and has recently shown interest in creating a similar facility near Tilawa, where a 12-million square meter economic zone has been set aside to accommodate Chinese hi-tech enterprises, several of which are known to function in concert with the PLA. There are also reports -- as yet unconfirmed -- of a Chinese electronic listening post in one of the Maldives' atolls. Unlike the Western powers, who have mercilessly pressured the secular administration of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom into accommodating a significantly Wahabbist opposition, the Chinese Communist Party has refrained from seeking to impose its own political preferences on the elite of the strategically-located island republic.
As for Bangladesh, which signed a Pakistan-style nuclear cooperation agreement with China in 2005, several teams of Chinese experts have already visited the country, deepening the links between its own military and the powerful Bangladesh armed forces. Soon Bangladeshi frigates will be armed with Chinese-supplied C-802 missiles that can be used to challenge capital ships from countries seen by Dacca as unfriendly.
Pakistan is already a leading beneficiary of Chinese-source missiles, including the reverse-engineered Tomahawk -- called the HATF by Islamabad. Substantial electronic and human capacity to monitor both civilian and military shipping along the Straits of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea have already been put in place in Gwadar, in Pakistan's restive Balochistan province.
Even Bhutan and Nepal -- thus far seen as being within the Indian sphere of influence -- are being energetically wooed by Beijing, which has already expanded its presence in Nepal considerably during the past four years. Once the Qinghai-Tibet railway line is extended from Lhasa to Zhangmu in 2012, it would be possible to run a spur into Nepal. This would expand the links already present with Pakistan and Myanmar.
Since 1999, China has quietly but consistently enhanced its force projection capabilities to a level that can challenge the United States, Australia and Japan. Unless, that is, India joins the trio, despite the clamor from Beijing and its boosters in New Delhi.
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(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University.)
