Centre okays 50,000-strong force to tackle Chinese threat
- By Express News Service - NEW DELHI
18th July 2013 07:34 AM
![The new mountain strike corps will be tasked with an offensive role in the north-eastern part of India. |AP File photo]()
The new mountain strike corps will be tasked with an offensive role in the north-eastern part of India. |AP File photo
The Union government on Wednesday decided to raise a 50,000-strong force of mountain strike corps along the eastern sector at a cost of Rs 65,000 crore to boost India’s offensive capability to counter neighbouring China.
The nod for the Indian Army’s proposal came from a Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, government sources said here.
The expenses for raising the new strike corps, which would have more than 50,000 troopers and specialist mountain warfare equipment, will be spread over a seven-year period till 2020, with funds flowing during both the 2012-17 12th plan and 2017-22 13th plan periods under its Long Term Integrated Perspective Plan (LTIPP), sources said.
Along with the mountain strike corps, which will be based at Panagarh in West Bengal, the Indian Army has also mooted two new ‘independent’ infantry brigades and as many ‘independent’ armoured brigades. Plans in this regard are yet to finalised, though the new brigades are likely to cost Rs 19,000 crore.
The new brigades would plug operational gaps along the 4,057-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) and would boost counter offensive capabilities.
The new mountain strike corps will be tasked with an offensive role in the north-eastern part of India, where Arunachal Pradesh shares a long LAC with China, which has been claiming the State as its territory.
The proposed formation will be the fourth such offensive corps apart from the existing three strike corps — 1 Corps based in Mathura, 2 Corps at Ambala and 21 Corps at Bhopal — focused on Pakistan. The new mountain strike corps was mooted after the Indian armed forces incorporated the possibility of a two-front war with Pakistan and China in it doctrines.
The new mountain strike corps proposal has already been tweaked and approved by the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC), headed by Indian Air Force (IAF) chief Air Chief Marshal N A K Browne and has Army chief General Bikram Singh and Navy chief Admiral D K Joshi as members.http://newindianexpress.com/nation/Centre-okays-50000-strong-force-to-tackle-Chinese-threat/2013/07/18/article1688814.ece
![In this file photo, an Indian soldiers patrols near the Line of Actual Control at Kaman Post, Jammu and Kashmir. The Cabinet Committee on Security has given its in-principle approval to the Army’s proposal to raise a mountain strike corps along the China border.]( "In this file photo, an Indian soldiers patrols near the Line of Actual Control at Kaman Post, Jammu and Kashmir. The Cabinet Committee on Security has given its in-principle approval to the Army’s proposal to raise a mountain strike corps along the China border.")
Published: July 18, 2013 01:58 IST | Updated: July 18, 2013 09:32 IST
Cabinet nod for mountain strike corps along China border
Vinay Kumar
The HinduIn this file photo, an Indian soldiers patrols near the Line of Actual Control at Kaman Post, Jammu and Kashmir. The Cabinet Committee on Security has given its in-principle approval to the Army’s proposal to raise a mountain strike corps along the China border.
The Army unit will take care of India’s operational gaps along the Line of Actual Control
The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) on Wednesday gave its in-principle approval to the Army’s ambitious proposal to raise a mountain strike corps along the China border.
At a long-drawn CCS meeting here on Wednesday, presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the proposal to raise a mountain strike corps was discussed in detail, highly placed government sources told The Hindu.
The CCS approval came after the Defence Ministry clarified certain questions raised by the Finance Ministry over the proposal. The CCS nod for the Army’s proposal, has been pending for the past few years, came nearly two weeks after Defence Minister A.K. Antony returned from his maiden visit to Beijing.
The strike corps is expected to cost Rs. 62,000 crore, spread over the entire 12th Plan (2012-17), the sources said.
The Army is learnt to have proposed raising a mountain strike corps, two independent infantry brigades and two independent armoured brigades to take care of its operational gaps along the entire line of actual control (LAC) with China.
The proposed strike corps, with about 45,000 soldiers and headquartered at Panagarh in West Bengal, will also give India the capability to launch offensive action in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in the event of a Chinese offensive. India has also got two infantry divisions at Lekhapani and Missamari in Assam, which were raised in 2009-10 to take care of operational needs in Arunachal Pradesh.
On the other hand, China has about five fully-operational airbases, a well laid down rail network and over 58,000- km of roads along the Indian border, which enable it to move over 30 divisions (each with over 15,000 soldiers) to the LAC, outnumbering the Indian forces.
The Army has been evaluating the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ground-air combat military drill on the Tibetan plateau that took place in March.
On infrastructure-building by China along the border, Mr. Antony told Parliament earlier this year that the government was regularly monitoring all developments in “our neighbourhood,” which have a bearing on national security. “Required measures have been initiated through development of infrastructure and operational capabilities to achieve desired levels of defence preparedness to safeguard the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of India,” he had said in a written reply.
Keen to get the Air Force also on board, the CCS on earlier occasions is learnt to have asked the armed forces to work out finer details and come up with a compact proposal for raising a strike corps. Discussions on raising such a force, and two additional divisions for defence of Arunachal Pradesh, began about six years ago and continued at various levels, before the proposal was sent to the CCS a year ago, government sources familiar with the development said.
The proposed strike corps will draw support from IAF fighters operating from renovated bases in the northeast. Sukhoi-30s have been posted at bases in Tezpur and Chhabua. In addition, Jorhat, Bagdogra, Hashimara and Mohanbari bases are also being upgraded.
“The PLA has held at least 21 exercises in the Tibet region over the past one-and-a-half years. These have been designed for specific scenarios. These exercises also convey to India that they are gearing preparations in high altitude conditions. China wants to convey that it is testing and strengthening its conventional deterrents and enhancing military capability in hostile territory,” Srikanth Kondapalli, chairman of Centre for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, had earlier told The Hindu.
ONE XI TAUGHT A LESSON, ANOTHER FAILS TO LEARN IT
- Thursday, 18 July 2013 | Claude Arpi |
President Xi Jinping has been talking a great deal of reclaiming the past glories of communism in China and building on it a new ‘dream’ for his country. What if that dream sours, like others did in the past?
The 10th Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s 8th Central Committee was held in September 1962 in Beijing. It was to be a crucial meet not only because Mao Zedong had decided to attack ‘arrogant’ India, but because it witnessed the first purge which culminated in the Cultural Revolution a few years later.
According to Dr Li Zhisui, Mao’s private physician and author of The Private Life of Chairman Mao, “During the Plenum, Mao retook the upper hand on the Party and his old comrades. He reemphasized class struggle in order to prevent the emergence of revisionism.” The main casualty of the Plenum was Xi Zhongxun. The Vice-Premier’s mistake was that he was too close to Marshal Peng Dehuai who had dared to criticise Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1959; further, Xi Zhongxun was suspected to support the ‘Three Nis’, thanks to the Chinese pronunciation: Kennedy (Ken-ni-di), Nikita Khrushchev (Ni-ji-ta), Nehru (Ni-he-lu).
At the time of the Plenum, Xi Zhongxun’s son was a young boy; he was only nine years-old. He must have been deeply traumatised when his father was sent to the wilderness of Chinese gaols for the next 16 years. Senior Xi would only be rehabilitated by his old Comrade Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
Fifty-one year later, Xi Zhongxun’s son, today China’s President and General Secretary of the Communist Party, exhorts the Chinese nation to return to the good old Communist values. It is difficult to comprehend, but last week, Xinhua reported: ‘Xi urges China to keep red’.The new Emperor paid a visit to Xibaipo in the northern province of Hebei; it was the old revolutionary base, where from May 1948 to early 1949, the Communist leadership worked on the blueprint of the new Red China.
According to Xinhua, addressing the Party cadres, Xi Junior “urged the 85 million members of the Communist Party of China to work hard and serve the people wholeheartedly to ensure the color of red China will never change.”President Xi Jinping warned the Party cadres against the Four Decadences: Formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance. While fighting laxity, mediocrity and corruption, Xi said the campaign should focus on self-purification, self-perfection, self-renewal and self-progression. Xi called for “thorough inspection, overhaul and cleanup”.
He probably did not have in mind the rectification session of the 10th Plenum, when he said: “Late Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s remarks on Party members’ work styles prior to the founding of New China in 1949 still have far-reaching ideological and historical significance.”
His recent leitmotif has been: “If every CPC member and every grassroots organ…do a good job, the Party will be strong, the country will be strong and people will be strong. Thus, the Party’s rule will have a solid foundation.” The President asked the senior provincial officials to take the lead in the ‘Campaign on Mass Line Education and Practice’; Mao Zedong used the word, ‘mass line’ to explain the need for the Party to stay in touch with the ‘masses’.
President Xi’s point is that if the Party is unable to do this, it will die. The ‘chaos’ so feared by the old emperors will then follow. At the same time, he does not want to blindly follow the ‘Western’ style of democracy which would, according to him, destroy the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of the Middle Kingdom. He probably believes that the Indian model is not efficient enough.
The new drive is not limited to the cadres, the People’s Liberation Army too have to “nurture the core values of the contemporary revolutionary soldier” and have to do “a better job in educating, nurturing and molding the soldier’s character”. This mass line scheme follows a campaign calling for a Chinese Dream, the catchword of the new Chinese leadership. The People’s Daily explains Xi’s Dream: “The Chinese dream is a dream for development.” The leadership today believes that China has become the stabiliser of the world economy and following the international financial crisis, its new engine.
For the new President: “The Chinese dream is a dream for harmony. Unfair and unreasonable old international order which has not been fundamentally changed is the most important cause of world chaos and dilemma.” That is not all, the Chinese dream is a dream for cooperation and finally a dream for peace: “China stands for peace settlement for global disputes and issues and the new security concept of mutual trust, mutual benefit and cooperation.”
The South China Morning Post quotes Professor Wang Yukai of the Chinese Academy of Governance agreeing with Xi: “The key to the Party’s rule is to improve its capacity to rule and maintain its internal vitality.” That sounds nice. Chinese like it so much that hundreds of think-tanks, universities, national and regional institutions have started studying ‘The Dream’ and begun publishing comments and dissertations on it.
Even the PLA is praising the Dream. The People’s Liberation Daily has even gone a step further: “It is like seeing a ship’s mast in the sea, like seeing the radiant sun rise in the east”. The Editor added: “It is the dogma of my belief, the cosmic truth. ...The dream is more important than anything…it is like water that carries the ship; like the wind that sustains the wings.”
It is rare for the Chinese Army to have glimpses of the ‘cosmic truth’. Is it this ‘cosmic’ experience which guided some Chinese jawans to the Depsang Plain, near Daulat Beg Oldi in the rarefied altitude of Ladakh or in Chumar, when some of them stole ‘dysfunctional’ surveillance cameras from the Indian side of the LAC? But some voices already doubt the new campaign. Li Haiqing, a Communist Party historian at the Central Party School writes in Study Times, the School newspaper: “The mass line is not an effective substitute that can realise the function of democracy.”
This reminds me of the thoughts of Li, when looking at the flat ECG of the Great Helmsman who had just passed away: “In the beginning, I had adulated Mao. He was China’s saviour, the country’s messiah. But this had long since passed. My dream of a new China, where all men would be equal and exploitation ended, had been shattered years before. I had no faith in the Communist party, of which I was still a member; [today], an era has ended, Mao’s time has passed.” President Xi wants to revive the past, it seems a pipedream.
The problem is that if the Dream turns sour, it may have serious consequences for China as well as its neighbours. India should watch carefully.