 Hello and welcome to NewSkink. I'm Poranjoy Gohar Thakurtha and with me here is Ajay Shukla. He retired as a colonel in the Indian Army. He's been a combat soldier for over two decades. He was served in various parts of the country, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipura, Rajal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and has now been a journalist for several years now. Earlier work with NTTV is a regular columnist with business standard, has a strategic affairs blog called Broad Sword and has of course reported from the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, besides of course different parts of India. Jammu and Kashmir and different parts of the north-eastern India was a UN peacekeeper in Mozambique. Thank you so much Ajay for giving us your time and pleasure. Let me start with something that's very very topic. As we are talking I heard that, I've read that the Prasar-Bharti cooperation, the one government owned broadcaster that has accused the press trust of India, arguably India's biggest news agency, of being quote-unquote anti-national. Why? Apparently because after the press trust of India interviewed the Chinese ambassador in Delhi, Sun Wei Dong, maybe my pronunciation is not all there, then the press trust of India interviewed ambassador Vikram Misri in Beijing and he was quoted as saying that Chinese troops need to move back to their side of the line of actual control and he said the only way to resolve the military standoff along the LSE is for China to stop erecting new structures. Now I mean you, because of your reporting, you have been accused of being an anti-national element by the media channels like Times Now and others. How do you react to the way the media has been drawn into this whole standoff between India and China? Let me start by saying that to be called anti-national nowadays is the highest form of praise in the media circles I think, because if you are not being called anti-national that means that you are for all practical purposes taking and reporting handouts from the government, saying exactly what the powers that we want you to say and in that sense not doing a reporting job as such, but being a stenographer for the government. So I think to say that you are anti-national is a very happy thing and I welcome it. You have done a very good thing, you are also a patriot. Further, the nation of India, which is in Beijing, Vikram Misri did what he said. Why are you so confused? According to the official narrative, there are no Chinese soldiers on Indian territory. Because if there are any Chinese soldiers on Indian territory, that would make the government look bad. So the Prime Minister has said there are no soldiers on Indian territory and he had to go back from that statement. His official website was modified to sort of accommodate that. But when the ambassador in Beijing says that the Chinese troops should go back from Indian territory across the line of actual control, then the Indian ambassador to China is also saying effectively that there are Chinese soldiers on Indian territory. So that makes him also anti-national. So welcome Mr. Misri, one more member of the anti-national club. Ajay, this controversial statement made on the 19th of June at the so-called All-Party meeting though the Aam Admi Party and the Ratri Janta Dal was not represented. I quote exactly and this was a television, everybody saw it, even if it is not currently on the official website of the Prime Minister's office or the Prime Minister. He said that there is no post on any other territory. Which has been interpreted, literally translated. Neither has anybody intruded inside our territory nor are any of our posts being captured. Now when this was said, various people commented on it including former Prime Minister Manwansingh who said that the Prime Minister has to be very mindful of the implications of his words because they have an implication on national security, on strategic and of course territorial interests. And of course the BJP reacted very, very negatively. Mr. JP Nanta, the BJP president said that Manwansingh belongs to a political party that has helplessly surrendered 43,000 square kilometres and there have been 600 Chinese incursions between 2010 and 2000. You know, I mean, we are really seeing a political slanging match when the country is supposed to be united. And then I think nobody wants more. I think that's absolutely correct, aptly summed up by you. The whole problem is that the Chinese entry into Indian territory has sort of made the government look bad, look weak, look fusillanimous. So the government has to create this fiction that no Chinese are on Indian territory. Now to create this fiction, you have to reconcile the statements of a large number of people as it is the external affairs ministry statement has gone against what the fiction should be because they have also talked about the line of actual control and respecting the need to respect the line of actual control. Vikram Mishri has talked about going back across the line of actual control. The fact that 20 Indian soldiers have been killed means that the Chinese were across on our side of the line of control or else that our soldiers went across the line of actual control, which is what the Chinese say. So now the official narrative has come to be aligned with the Chinese narrative. So there are so many complications in creating this fiction that no Chinese soldiers are on the Indian side of the line of control and I think everybody with an ounce of common sense would ask how have 20 soldiers died if no Chinese soldiers came across our side of the line of control? Is India aggressing against China? So I think it's just a fiction that China is playing very beautifully. It aligns with the statements that they want to make and depending on what China's ultimate intentions are we might rarely come to regret having made the statement that there are no Chinese soldiers on our side of the line. Let's come to that in a little bit and we'll talk about Jingoism and what's happening but let me briefly ask you to react to some of the comments that were made by left-wing general SL Narasimhan in an interview with Karan Thapar. It was a long 40-minute interview so I'm picking out some particular portions. But what he said is that on the 15th of June the clash at Galwan Valley began on Indian territory. It was a melee, both sides pushed each other around. There were physical contacts and it may have concluded on the Chinese side of the LSE and there were no Chinese on the Indian side when the clash ended. This is what he said. And he said that the structure that was destroyed by one of the people who was martyred, the Colonel Santosh Babu, was a few meters on the Indian side of the LSE. And now this is the whole thing. I mean General Narasimhan is dismissing media reports on the Galwan Valley, on Debsang, on Pangong Lake that India had agreed to some sort of a buffer zone and no man's land along this area which has always been ill-defined as to what is the line of actual control. Your comments please. General Narasimhan is an honorable man but he finds himself in the awkward position of having to support the official narrative and the method he has chosen to doing it is by saying that the Chinese were on the Indian side of the line of actual control but they were there only a few meters and they were there only temporarily because the melee began on the Indian side and then went over to the Chinese side. So now how convoluted can we get? They are there but they are there only a few meters. As far as I am concerned, if anybody violates Indian territory by even one meter that person is violating Indian territory. It's simple as all that. A violation becomes a violation at the border not after you have ingressed several kilometers inside. So, you know, there are far too many may have beens, might have beens. I believe it is my belief and statements like that which essentially absolve him from having to tell a lie. But at the bottom of the entire thing is that he is finding himself in a position as a member of the National Security Advisory Board and sort of advisor to the government of having to support the government in telling a lie. Okay, Ajay, we are all aware that the origins of the problem are very very old and it's been, I mean this problem has been going on for well over 70 years, way back in the 70s and we know that India and China haven't been able to agree on a fully demarcated border. It is different from the LOC with Pakistan, the line of control. But, you know, we've had a 62 war and now when we say that the Chinese have entered 18 kilometers into the ELSC and then they're building a helipad in the Bangong area. Now all of these, we are hearing a huge amount of claims, counter claims and most of us don't know the truth. I mean, we all know that India is the only country that held out in Asia against the BRI, the Belt and Road Initiative. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, we know that this whole, when Amit Shah says we'll take back every inch of Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Aksai Jinn, you know, I mean you know it's threatening not just the BRI, there are two corridors, the Tibet-Zinjiang Corridor and the Kashgar-Gwadar Corridor. Now if Amit Shah thought he was meant for a domestic audience, the Chinese clearly responded by building up the infrastructure quicker than what we anticipated. It would certainly appear to the unbiased observer that the Home Minister was extremely rash in saying what he said. Basically threatening both Pakistan and China. There are negotiations underway with both countries for these disputed territories. And when you sort of make a political statement that we will get back these territories, especially having come on the back of having already made a very aggressive move in Kashmir, then it would be sort of harsh to assume that only Indians are listening to this speech and you know the foreign people concerned are not hearing what I'm saying or not taking it seriously. These are not the actions of the Serious Defence Minister. So I think that you know the ball may have been set into motion. The ball that has led to the current crisis and the current standoff may have been set in motion there. There could be other reasons as well as you bring out yourself. China might be well sort of seeking to give India a message that there is only one power pyramid in Asia and at the apex of that power pyramid sits China, not you. So there could be that dimension as well. And there is of course this whole issue of infrastructure building which China has never liked on the Indian side. There is no reason why we should not build infrastructure on our own territory. Let me ask you a few questions about the geopolitical aspects of what you just commented on. But before that, what General Harcharanjit Singh Panagya, he's retired as left in general, he says China has taken over ridges that are strategically important. Now, strategically important for these corridors. Now these are 14,000 feet, 16,000 feet above sea level. We know the famous statement made by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, not a blade of grass grows in Aksai Chin. But one claim is that commanding officer Santosh Babu went with 35 jawans to negotiate a Chinese dismantling of structures that had been agreed on. Now, this is the whole issue. You had a face off on the 5th and the 6th of May. And then on the 6th of June at Chushul, you had a first meeting of the lay core commander left in general, Harinder Singh, and the South Xinjiang military region's representative, Major General Lin Liu, if I'm not correct, if I'm correct. So the point is what, I mean, if you look at the sequence of events, why don't you just clarify what happened and then I'll ask you a few questions on the bigger geopolitical story. Yes. It's hard for me to offer anyone here to actually piece together the precise events that took place that day and the events that led to the killing of 20 soldiers. But we can certainly assume and be sure of a few things. One is that Colonel Babu who was the commander on the ground at the spot over there, a brave man, a good soldier by all accounts. He was charged with the job of ensuring that Chinese ingress into Indian territory had been reversed, that the structures they had built on Indian territory had been dismantled, and that they had gone over to the Chinese side itself. Now that tells its own story to all those who wish to exercise their common sense, which side of the line of control were the Chinese. Clearly on the Indian side, they were to go back to the Chinese side. The other thing we can be sure of is that the Chinese had sort of created an altercation. This sort of Indian pressure to move back on their side was not taken kindly to by the Chinese and an altercation began and there were casualties in that altercation. We do not know how many Chinese were killed in that altercation. It is very regrettable that the Indian government has sought to make acceptable the killing of 20 Indian soldiers by seeking to create the narrative that 43 Chinese soldiers were also killed. I don't care if one Chinese soldier was killed, 10 were killed, 20 or 100. The deaths of 20 Indian soldiers have to be sort of accounted for. And if there was any sort of missed judgment of the tactical situation or some sort of militarily unsound decisions that were taken that led to those deaths, that needs to be judged regardless of how many Chinese soldiers were killed. There are just too many fictions being created around all these events which are resulting in our losing focus on what the real issues are, what we should be looking at. And that is very, very regrettable and it's a direct function of this whole politicization of this event. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the geopolitical aspects of what has happened. Now it's hardly a secret that suddenly China perceives India to have tilted excessively towards the United States and the Quad which includes Japan and Australia. Now, after Article 370 was written down and all that happened in parliament, what Amit Shah said, we've also seen Houdi Modi and Namaste Trump happening. But the point is, if India joins the United States geopolitically, will it be beneficial for us? Will it be economically beneficial for us? Will it be geopolitically beneficial for us? Many say we have both nuclear powers but India will be hurt far more than China and just even the trade boycott and the investment relations or the restrictions on investment is all going to hurt India more than that. So how do you see the whole geopolitical compulsions and what has happened in Ladakh? I mean it means for what has happened and what is likely to happen at the end of the day. Perhaps you can argue that President Xi Jinping has accumulated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao or Mao Zedong. We can talk about all those. We know that Modi also needs to save peace. So how do you sort of connect all these dots together, the geopolitical dots and the geo-strategic dots? First of all, the access or the deepening of friendship with the United States of America is long overdue, is to be extremely sort of happily welcomed by all parties concerned in India and will certainly be in India's national interest. That having been said, this is no more so than the deepening of relationship with Russia, with China, with the European countries and so on and so forth. What I am really saying is India should be deepening its relationship with all countries. It should be deepening its relationship with the United States but not getting into any camp or any overt alliance with one or the other, the superpowers. That has always been India's sort of multi-alignment strategy. Earlier it was called non-alignment. It is seen as the best way to avoid getting into conflicts and to maximize India's national insecurity interests. The problem starts, however, when as you increase your relationship and deepen your friendship with one country, if another country that is hostile to that first country or deepening your relationship with, in this case China with America, then you have potentially a problem on your hands because there is pressure from country A, namely America, to ally with that country or to at least partner that country in countering country B, which is China. There is also on the part of country B, which is China, the fear that this country India is getting too deep into the other country's camp and that needs to be deterred in some way. But when it takes the form of armed action as it has taken now, I think we need to ask ourselves several questions here. Was India really too deep into the American camp? Is that it aroused China's sort of fears to such an extent that China felt emboldened to act militarily? Which got exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and the economic crisis that is accompanying it. Paranjoy, one of the great lessons that China has internalized from the 1962 war was that it was a tactical victory but a huge strategic defeat because for half a century after that it has placed India in opposition to China. And therefore I am a little hesitant to jump too easily to the conclusion that China is doing what it is doing because it wants to deter India from joining the American camp because the one action that is certain if China takes any steps forward in this matter and perhaps gets into an open war with India is that India will be an alienable part of the American axis and be a part of the Quad forevermore. So is China making that same strategic error that it made in 1962? That's the question that we want to ask ourselves because if China has become smarter than it was at the time of Mao then the aim behind what it is doing is different. It is more tactical, less strategic, less geopolitical and it could have to do something with just sort of while sending a subliminal message to India it could be more to do with tactical issues like infrastructure building and sort of encouraging India to reach a border settlement that favors China or things of that kind. So I think we'll have to wait and see how this plays out and then there are a jump to these conclusions. Okay, my last question to you since you have limited time. We don't want to be jingoistic. We don't want war. Neither side may be innocent but both sides tried to build perhaps infrastructure where the line of actual control is not well defined. Is the board calling the cat to cat lack? Are we going to get into more and more into this tutu-meh-meh business? The Chinese didn't react initially when the TBO, the Dolatbe Goldi Road was being built and then Alam Bell's land after what happened Article 370 was written down but with. Mr. Modi, India's Prime Minister has invested heavily in his relationship with the Chinese President Xi Jinping. We know that they've met at least 18 times since he became Prime Minister including one-on-one meetings at Wuhan April 2018 in Mahabali Puram in October 2019, the famous swing on the banks of the Sabar Mati. So now this excludes all the time he spent when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat but the point is since Mr. Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 he's met the Chinese Premier at least 18 times and he's visited China five times. So we're seeing the belligerence on the part of Nepal, on the Mahishu. So how does Mr. Modi save base? I go back to the final question. What do you see happening from here onwards on the India side and on the China side? Well, let me start by saying that I don't necessarily think that meeting the Chinese Prime Minister numerous times is a bad thing. For India it would be good if the Prime Minister met the leader and the supreme leader I should say of China as many times as possible. The problem however starts when the Indian Prime Minister starts seeing these meetings as a substitute for the hard actions that are needed to drive forward the diplomatic relationship or he sees it as a way of having won over the Chinese president and put him in his pocket and now China will do what India wants. That would be self delusion of the highest order and my fear is that in these 19 or 18 meetings Prime Minister Modi may not have really understood Xi Jinping but Xi Jinping has really understood Prime Minister Modi and he has understood his vulnerability in the sense of his need to appear powerful and domestically strong to his audience which leads directly to the conclusion from the Chinese side that his need to not be seen as having taken a body blow from the Chinese means that even when we go into Indian territory Modi and his supporters will argue that we have not come there. So this is a very dangerous situation to be in. Going forward from here, I mean that Mr Modi is China's best choice as Prime Minister for India. I think that Mr Modi in the chair over here would give a lot of happiness to China because he appears to believe that he is a great supporter of China has a great relationship with China, with China Supreme Leader. So why would China want to shake him off the chair? So I think that going forward there will be a modus vivendi. Mr Modi will actively acquiesce in trying to paint that vivendi as sort of an equal one with China but it will be on China's terms by the looks of it. Thank you so much, Jay for giving us your time and giving us your views. Thank you for the pleasure of talking to you. And time alone will tell what happens from here onwards but on behalf of all the viewers of this program and on behalf of Newsclick thank you very much once again and keep watching Newsclick.