India v. China: Border Games

India is now the belle of the ball, as most of the world and Asian regional powers make pilgrimages to New Delhi to flatter and flirt with India’s dynamic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

Modi and India come with a certain amount of unpleasant baggage, which their suitors do their best to ignore.  Modi himself is an unrepentant Hindutva cultural chauvinist  whose attitudes toward Muslims (and convincing circumstantial evidence of his involvement in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat—so convincing, in fact, he was previously banned from the United States) trend toward the fascistic.  

 In regional affairs, India has not been a particularly responsible or constructive actor, having mixed it up with Pakistan (assisted the split-off of East Pakistan a.ka. Bangladesh in 1971), Nepal (opened the door to the Nepalese Maoists with its ineptly executed deposition of King Gyanendra in 2008), and Sikkim (Sikkim, in case you noticed, doesn’t exist anymore; it was annexed by India in 1975), and has presided over a bloody insurgency and brutal counterinsurgency in Kashmir that has claimed the lives of at least 60,000 people.  India birthed the horrific Tamil Tiger insurgency in Sri Lanka  and its intelligence services played what may have been a decisive role in organizing and executing the successful electoral challenge, on January 8, 2015, which ended the rule of the pro-Chinese (now-ex) president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa.

And there’s the People’s Republic of China, and the contested borderlands of Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast and Ladakh/Aksai Chin in the northwest.

Japan’s Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, got himself tangled up in the Arunachal Pradesh issue during his recent visit to India.  

China today lodged a protest with Tokyo after Japan's foreign minister was quoted as saying that Arunachal Pradesh was "India's territory".

Japan's Sankei Shimbun, a conservative daily, quoted Fumio Kishida as having made the remarks in New Delhi on Saturday.

Japan played down the issue today, saying it could not confirm Kishida's reported remarks. It added that it hoped India and China could resolve their border dispute peacefully.

Kishida's reported remarks drew an angry response from China, which called on Tokyo to "understand the sensitivity of the Sino-India boundary issue".

A Japanese foreign ministry spokesperson said "the statement was made considering the reality that Arunachal Pradesh state is basically in reality controlled by India and that China and India are continuing negotiations over the border dispute".

China disputes the entire territory of Arunachal, calling it south Tibet, especially Tawang, a key site for Tibetan Buddhism. The historic town briefly fell into Chinese hands during their 1962 war before Beijing retreated.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry backtracked expeditiously, indicating that Kishida’s remarks were perhaps a slip of the tongue and not meant to inject Japan into the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Ever since Prime Minister Abe returned to office with an India-centric Asian policy, yearnings have been expressed that Japan might openly side with India on the Arunachal Pradesh issue.  The PRC, was extremely leery of previous PM Manmohan Singh and his overt diplomatic and emotional tilt toward Japan and, with good reason, has expected the current officeholder, Narendra Modi, to play off China, Russia, and the United States in a more pragmatic manner.

Modi will certainly keep the PRC off balance. President Obama’s decision to accept Prime Minister Modhi’s invitation to attend the Republic Day extravaganza further buttressed Modi’s prestige and popularity within India and elicited a wave of “Mobama” triumphalism in the press, much to China’s discomfiture.  

Modi averred to President Obama that he was angry and disappointed with the PRC over alleged border perfidy in Ladakh in 2014 at the time of Xi Jinping's visit, and Modi endorsed the US position on the South China Sea and efforts to upgrade the US-Japan-India-Australia security quadrilateral.  

In the matter of the "border" incident (there is no accepted border or even a mutually understood Line of Control; there is an overlapping 20-kilometer wide band in which Indian and PRC local forces work within ill-defined "Lines of Perception" and engage in persistent envelope-pushing, patrolling, hut construction, and road-building that make it easy for either side to foment an incident) in the barren wastes of Ladakh, perhaps Xi Jinping thought he could get Sino-Indian relations on a solid footing by humiliating Modi before his army and his nation with a gratuitous provocation.  

An equally plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable PRC affront--which recapitulated a previous incident in Ladakh that similarly overshadowed the decidedly unmartial technocrat Li Keqiang's state visit in 2013--was that it was engineered by hardliners in the Indian security establishment (who exhaustively backgrounded, briefed, and ballyhoo'd the incident to the receptive Indian press during Xi's visit) to balk PRC attempts to improve relations and negotiate the borders issue, and Modi grasped the opportunity to wrongfoot the economically and strategically overbearing PRC in order to advance his strategic agenda 

In this case, perhaps Modi was putting the incident to further good use to tell President Obama exactly what he wanted to hear, provide a compelling narrative to underpin the important Sino-US relationship, and help extract various economic and security benefits, including the heightened intelligence cooperation that advocates of the US-Indian security alliance are promoting.  

Per the Indian Express (which also revealed in passing that, in addition to the canonical "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing arrangement, the US has also midwifed "Nine Eyes" and "Fourteen Eyes" intel clubs in Europe in addition to pacts with Japan and South Korea), Indian intelligence priorities will include a) Pakistan b) China c) keeping the US at arms-length, not necessarily in that order:

The pact would enable India access to encrypted digital traffic its intelligence services are now unable to decipher.  It would also make state-of-the-art western espionage technology available to the Directorate of Military Intelligence and the National Technical Research Organization...The US has provided a growing volume of information on planned attacks by Pakistan-based groups--helping India pre-empt at least two attacks on diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.

....

There are, sources said, several formidable challenges to be overcome before India can begin purchasing cutting edge digital intelligence technologies from the US. For example, fearful that equipment can be used to eavesdrop on sensitive information, India insists on domestic security certification for purchases.  However, no Indian firm currently certifies EAL7+, the most stringent standard for digital security.

...

Fears also exist that an intelligence-sharing agreement might allow penetration of its own secrets.  The Vajpayee government (the first BJP national government--ed.) which saw the first warming in ties with the US, was deeply embarrassed by the disclosure that the US had recruited Research and Analysis Wing officer Rabinder Sing...

It remains to be seen who comes out ahead in the US-India tango and, in particular, how deep Modi is willing to follow the US down the China-containment rabbit hole.  Modi's statements on China policy are, for the time being, cost-free lip service and in the end, Modi played true to independent form in the matter of climate change by publicly and bluntly rejecting President Obama’s call to limit India’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

For the PRC, an important area of anxiety is Arunachal Pradesh and the threat that India might “internationalize” the bilateral border dispute by canvassing its actual and would-be allies for support on the issue, perhaps even to the extent of going tit-for-tat with Japan i.e. India backing Japan on the issue of Senkaku sovereignty in return for Japanese aid and comfort on AP.

However, for the time being it looks like Japan—like the Asian Development Bank, which ran into a PRC buzzsaw when it tried to put an Arunachal Pradesh hydropower project on its agenda in 2009—is not quite ready to mix it up on AP.

Let’s unpack the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Arunachal Pradesh is a region controlled by India in its northeast quadrant, between Bhutan and Burma, home to a variety of ethnic groups.  One of those groups is Tibetan, centered on the town and district of Tawang in the western end of AP at the border with Bhutan.

The Arunachal Pradesh dispute is bookended with Aksai Chin, a blasted desert between India and the PRC in the northwest that is controlled by the PRC.  The Indian claim to Aksai Chin is not terribly robust, since it is based on an internal British Indian survey—the Johnson Line—which was never discussed or agreed with China.  The PRC built a strategic road across Aksai Chin in the 1950s, and it took several years for the Indian government to even find out it was there.

There is a third slice of disputed territory, the “Trans-Karakorum Tract” bordering Kashmir, geographically distinct from Aksai Chin, which India claims Pakistan illegally ceded to the PRC in a land swap.  For some reason, the PRC and India aren’t arguing about this piece. 

Both Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin territories have been openly disputed since before the 1962 Sino-Indian war.  The PRC has at times offered a grand bargain in which the two sides acknowledge each other’s regions of effective control, by which India got AP and the PRC gets AC.

The official Indian response has been Nothing Doing and all territory it lost in the 1962 war must be recovered i.e. Aksai Chin is not negotiable.  It has decoupled the two issues, and has focused its diplomacy on the insistence that its sovereignty over AP be confirmed.  

India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.

In 1914, Great Britain was interested in creating an autonomous Tibetan buffer—“Outer Tibet”—between British India and Russia/China.  To this end, Sir Henry McMahon, the Foreign Minister of British India, invited Tibetan and Republic of China delegates to the Indian town of Simla.

Tibet, eager to be acknowledged as an autonomous power with its own rights to negotiate directly with foreign powers (and not just through China), generously conceded a delineation of Lhasa’s sphere of control—the McMahon Line--alienating Tawang, a market town that interested the Raj, to British India.

However, the Simla Agreement was negotiated between the Tibetan and British representatives in a provisional sort of way after the Chinese representatives had packed up and left.  Since Britain’s Foreign Office was protective of its China diplomacy and not interested in encouraging Tibetan pretensions to negotiate as an independent sovereign power, the absence of the Chinese representatives—and without a Chinese endorsement of the border arrangement accepted by the Tibetan authorities--was a dealbreaker.

The Simla Agreement was apparently treated as an aspirational document and was recorded in the most authoritative compendium of British Indian treaties, Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads, with the notation that neither Great Britain nor China had ratified the treaty.  China, indeed, never accepted the McMahon Line.  Since Tibet wasn’t recognized as a sovereign power, whatever it hoped to achieve with the Simla Accord—and what it had tried to give away, namely Tawang-- was, in the eyes of the British, moot.

Things puttered along until 1935, when the detention of a British spy in Tawang by Tibetan authorities awakened the cupidity of a diplomat in the Foreign Office of British India, Olaf Caroe.

Caroe checked the files, found that Great Britain had no ratified claims on Tawang, and decided to amend and improve the record.

He arranged for the relevant original volume of the 1929 Aitchison compendium to be withdrawn from the various libraries in which it was filed, discarded, and replaced with a new version—but one that still claimed to be compiled in 1929, thereby removing the need for awkward explanations or documentation concerning why the switch had happened.  The spurious version claimed that Tibet and Britain had accepted the treaty.  Thereby, the unsurveyed McMahon Line was repurposed as a sacrosanct British imperial border, and Tawang was slotted into the British Indian side of the ledger.

The deception was only discovered in 1964, when a researcher was able to compare one of the last three surviving copies of the original compendium, at Harvard University, with the spurious replacement.

Unfortunately, that was too late for Nehru, who staked his security strategy and his diplomatic exchanges with China to a significant extent on the fallacy that he had inherited from British India a clear and unequivocal claim to its borders.

In 1962 Nehru decided to move up military units to assert India’s claim to contested territory in Ladakh/Aksai Chin and in Arunachal Pradesh under a gambit optimistically named The Forward Policy.  Unluckily for Nehru, Chairman Mao was itching to stick it to India’s patron, Nikita Khrushchev, and the PLA attacked with overwhelming force on both fronts.   India’s entire strategy had been predicated on the assumption that the PRC would not respond (shades, I think, of Western confidence that Vladimir Putin would stay his hand in eastern Ukraine out of fear of sanctions and the wrath of his impoverished and disgruntled oligarchs) and the Indian Army, outnumbered, undersupplied, and disorganized, was completely unprepared for a desperate fight on the remote, high altitude battlefields.

India suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the PLA.  After its victory, the PRC decided to take the high ground, diplomatically as well as geographically. It withdrew its forces to behind the McMahon Line and offered negotiations of the boundaries based on the status quo, in other words a de facto swap of AP for AC.

No dice, as we have seen.  India clearly does not see any need to credit Arunachal Pradesh—territory that the PRC abandoned—as any kind of bargaining chip concerning Aksai Chin.  This is, perhaps, a cautionary tale to the PRC as to the geostrategic minuses as well as pluses of trying to behave like Mr. Nice Guy.  

This history is officially persona non grata in India.  The report the Indian government commissioned on the 1962 war—the Henderson Brooks Report--was so devastating to India’s position and its legal, military, and diplomatic pretensions it was promptly banned and publication is forbidden to this day.  In an ironic recapitulation of the case of the Aitchison compendium, it was assumed that there were only two typewritten copies and they were securely buttoned up in safes in New Delhi.  However, the Times of London correspondent, Neville Maxwell, promptly got his hands on a copy and used it to write an expose on the tragedy of errors in 1962, India’s China War, thereby earning himself the fierce hatred of generations of Indian nationalists.

Maxwell tried several times to put the report into the public domain.

As quoted in Outlook India, Maxwell provided an interesting account of how the freedom of expression sausage gets made when the information involved is not necessarily a matter of national security (the report is classified Top Secret, but its content—the minutiae of military decisions and movements fifty years ago--has no current strategic or tactical significance) but is a matter of supreme political embarrassment (to Nehru, the Congress Party, the Gandhi political dynasty, and to the army).

My first attempt to put the Report itself on the public record was indirect and low-key: after I retired from the University I donated my copy to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where, I thought, it could be studied in a setting of scholarly calm. The Library initially welcomed it as a valuable contribution in that “grey area” between actions and printed books, in which I had given them material previously. But after some months the librarian to whom I had entrusted it warned me that, under a new regulation, before the Report was put on to the shelves and opened to the public it would have to be cleared by the British government with the government which might be adversely interested! Shocked by that admission of a secret process of censorship to which the Bodleian had supinely acceded I protested to the head Librarian, then an American, but received no response. Fortunately I was able to retrieve my donation before the Indian High Commission in London was alerted in the Bodleian’s procedures and was perhaps given the Report.

In 2002, noting that all attempts in India to make the government release the Report had failed, I decided on a more direct approach and made the text available to the editors of three of India’s leading publications, asking that they observe the usual journalistic practice of keeping their source to themselves. … To my surprise the editors concerned decided, unanimously, not to publish… Later I gave the text to a fourth editor and offered it to a fifth, with the same nil result.

Narendra Modi, a determined foe of the Congress Party and the Gandhis (I had to chuckle when I read these fawning articles about President Obama bonding with Prime Minister Modi over their shared Gandhi love, despite the awkward fact that Modi's Hindutva movement was and apparently still is the spiritual home of Gandhi’s assassin), came to power promising to release the report...but didn’t.  And when Maxwell finally posted part of the report on his website in 2014, the site was symbolically blocked.

Here is a link to a scan of Maxwell’s copy of the Henderson Brooks report..

 The Indian army, in particular, is wedded to a creation myth of PRC perfidy that is infinitely more utile than acknowledging that the PLA attack, rather than unprovoked, was a response to a strategically and diplomatically bankrupt Indian border gambit compounded by non-stop miscues by India’s civilian leadership and disastrous defeat for its military forces.  This default presumption of Chinese aggression against innocent India, which is still widely accepted in India and abroad, also makes it easy for India to impose its narrative on murky matters like the Ladakh incidents of 2013 and 2014--clashes which, when viewed through the lens of 1962, invite the speculation that India has not abandoned its border-pushing ways.

 

In 2005, the PRC and India started negotiations over the borders issue.  Here’s a nice explainer from the Daily Mail! in 2013 which signals that Aksai Chin might be on the table, but Tawang is off the table, and unfortunately omits the significant complication of the Caroe forgery.

India’s move into Arunachal Pradesh in the 1950s is less than a slam dunk according to international law, complicated in particular by the issue of Tawang.

Not only is there the problem of the shakiness of the McMahon line, highlighted by Olaf Caroe’s bibliographic hijinks, there is the awkward fact that India forcefully displaced Tibetan theocratic rule in Tawang—nominally rule from Lhasa, actually local rule by the immensely powerful monastery.

Lhasa had apparently experienced cartographic remorse over Simla and implored India to recognize Tawang as Tibetan territory in 1947.  Instead, India seized the district in 1951 in a quasi-official/quasi-military “liberating the Tibetan serfs” operation rather similar to what the PRC conducted in its part of Tibet.

In recent years, the Dalai Lama has been forced into the unpleasant position of affirming Indian sovereignty over Tawang, whose great monastery (the second largest in Tibetan Buddhism) first gave him shelter when he fled PRC control in 1959, and which had hosted the reincarnation of the 6^th Dalai Lama way back when.

The Dalai Lama apparently verbally acknowledged, if not in writing, that AP and Tawang belonged to India on a couple occasions while he still served at the apex of power in the Tibetan government in exile (a position he relinquished in 2011).

However, I assume twisting the Dalai Lama’s arm to concede Indian sovereignty over Tawang falls a little bit short, since the Tibetan government-in-exile lacks international recognition (and with it the right to cede territory to India).

The PRC is happy to harp on Tawang’s role in the AP situation, since it serves as a continual reminder that India is occupying territory in AP that, however you slice it, is a core component of the Tibetan homeland, thereby keeping alive a non-Indian or, if you want, a PRC-cum-Tibet claim to at least part of the region and attempting to balk India’s attempt to claim full sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh under international law.

To understand how this relates to the Senkakus requires reflection on another piece of suppressed history—that the United States returned the Senkakus to Japanese administrative control not sovereignty in 1973 as part of the Okinawa package with the stated expectation that the sovereignty of the rocks would be negotiated between China and Japan.

 

My personal opinion is that the PRC is in no hurry to unfreeze the conflict over Arunachal Pradesh, and its insistence on sovereignty over Tawang—a district, I suspect, that has extremely limited interest in reunification with the Chinese motherland—is something of a pretext. 

With the Simla Agreement tainted and no subsequent cession of Tawang by Tibet or China, the Indian position in Tawang is embarrassingly similar to that of the PRC in the matter of its seizure of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 i.e. having expelled the previous rulers by conquest and achieved control of the territory without attaining international recognition of its sovereignty.  And it’s somewhat similar to the Senkakus, where the United States effectively surrendered its sovereignty over the islands when it returned Okinawa and the Ryukyus to Japan, but didn’t cede its claim to anybody else.

Maybe Arunachal Pradesh is another one of those Mexican-standoff situations like Kashmir vs. Tibet (a.k.a. the Indian temptation to make mischief in the ethnic-Tibetan areas of the PRC is inhibited by concern that the PRC, via Pakistan, might light the fuse in Kashmir).  The PRC keeps the Tawang/AP issue alive to forestall thoughts by India of giving aid and comfort to Japan on the Senkakus or, for that matter, Vietnam on the Paracels.

Both the PRC and India are bulking up their infrastructure and military on their respective sides of the de facto McMahon-Line-based border, making it a virtual certainty that India will never alienate any part of AP, including Tawang.  

That’s good news for reduced actual tensions (as opposed to defense ministry posturing) at the shared border, but India’s heightened sense of security concerning Arunachal Pradesh may encourage it to be less tentative vis a vis the PRC in its Japanese and Vietnamese diplomacy.

So, paradoxically, greater security along the PRC-Indian border may lead to greater insecurity elsewhere.

N.B.  For further reading, readers are welcome to review my previous pieces on Sino-Indian relations: China “pivot” trips over McMahon Line; China’s Flank of Discontent;  India Places Its Asia Bet on Japan; Is Narendra Modi the Leader of the World's Largest Democracy...Or the World's Most Successful Fascist? 

Picture credits:
Republic Day photos: BBC

Map: Daily Mail 
Aitchison Compendium: www.amazon.com
Tawang Monastery: www.stevedinicol.com 

China's border rows mirror grim history

[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on May 3, 2013.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.  I was rather amused to see Paul Eckert of Reuters trolling the comment thread at Asia Times.  Not the way to build the Paul Eckert brand, let alone the Reuters brand.]

Two PRC territorial disputes open doors on two competing paths to Asia's future.

Door Number 1 - the sudden Sino-Indian confrontation in Ladakh - leads to the further development of the current Asian security regime as a network of bilateral relationships. Behind Door Number 2 - the festering Senkaku crisis - appears to lead to a multipolar regime with a powerful new independent player, uncertainty and danger. Asia's security future will follow one of these paths, but which one?

Events on the Indian-Chinese border have a distinctly familiar flavor. As in 1962, there is tension in Ladakh. Once again, the PRC is being blamed for an incursion. And once again, it appears that the international press is getting the story ass-backwards.

The story in the US press is that Chinese forces have barged 19 kilometers across the Line of Actual Control in the area of the Depsang Bulge to set up tents in a bleak, 17,000-foot (5,000-meter) high flat spot near the Karakorum Pass as part of the Chinese campaign to nibble away at the Indian position in Aksai Chin and demonstrate the appeasement-inclined spinelessness of the Singh government.

Understandably, it is viewed as inexplicable that the PRC is getting so chesty with India just before Premier Li Keqiang's state visit to New Delhi. As usual, when confronted with an implausible narrative, the reaction is to attribute the cognitive dissonance to Chinese irrationality, in this case to the PLA going "off the reservation" to make trouble on its own kick, demonstrating the party and state's inability to control its military.

AP provided the soundbite:

Manoj Joshi, a defense analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said the timing of the incursion raises questions about "whether there is infighting within the Chinese leadership, or whether someone is trying to upstage Li". [1]

Actually, it looks like the disarray is probably in Western noggins and not inside the CCP and PLA.

Drawing on a source who attended an Indian military briefing, Calcutta's The Telegraph posted a graphic that is well worth clicking on.

It illustrates that there is apparently no "Line of Actual Control" in the disputed region that is mutually acknowledged by India and the PRC. Instead, there are two "Lines of Perception". The Chinese claim they control a swath of land 10 km thisaway and the Indians claim they control a 10 km swath of land thataway. So there's a 10-km wide band of unpopulated and desolate wasteland whose "actual control" could be up for grabs.

In the past, both sides have patrolled this no-man's land but make a point of not setting up permanent facilities inside it so that the zone would not become focus of a competitive exercise in asserting control, and part of a wider fracas.

Until now.

It is not a matter of dispute that the PLA has moved troops into the area. But the troops are camping out in tents for now - non-permanent facilities in keeping with the traditional live-and-let-live precedent for the area. At the same time, the PRC is demanding that the Indian government dismantle bunkers and other permanent installations in the area. Permanent installations could very possibly represent an effort by the Indian military to transform "perceived control" of the disputed zone into "actual control".

On the Internet, assertions have surfaced that the Chinese incursion was in response to the Indian military's establishment of a permanent facility at Rika Nullah, inside the disputed zone. (It should be pointed out that a "permanent facility" in the bleak environs of Aksai Chin might simply be a few sheets of galvanized metal formed into a hut).

If this is true, a rather logical narrative emerges.

As the Times of India reporting indicates, the tussle over the "perceived control" of the "Depsung Bulge" looks like something of an inevitable glitch to be ironed out as both sides pour money, infrastructure, and forces into the area to institutionalize their "actual control" and jockey for the control of swaths of useful but not particularly vital "perceived control" territories before the security curtain comes down for good - and, hopefully, peace reigns on a well-defined and well-secured border.

The 15-day continuing face-off between troops at 16,300-feet, in a way, boils down to infrastructure build-up along the unresolved 4,057-km long Line of Actual Control (LAC). China has been assiduously strengthening it for well over two decades but has now objected to India's belated attempts to counter the moves.

India's re-activation of the advanced landing grounds (ALGS) at Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO), Fukche and Nyoma as well as construction of some temporary posts and bunkers at Chumar and Fukche near the LAC in eastern Ladakh over the last four to five years in particular has incensed China. The DBO airstrip, for instance, overlooks the strategic Karakoram Pass, while the Fukche ALG is barely 5 km from the LAC. [2]

As part of an overall strategy to formalize and assert its control over the border regions, perhaps the Indian government decided it is time to take a serious nibble out of the Depsung Bulge.

Or the Indian military, which (unlike the PLA) has a long and noble history of advancing its priorities and prerogatives in disregard for the civilian leadership, decides it wishes to create its own Senkaku moment, using the bulge as a territorial gambit.

Or the PRC did decide to commit an unprovoked incursion, squatting on bulge land in order to have a bargaining chip to get the Indian government to stand down on some of its more impressive and alarming military improvements in Ladakh. I consider this unlikely, not because of the essential law-abiding benevolence of the Chinese government but because it isn't going to work. The Indian army (and its inescapable cohort, Indian nationalist public opinion) is not going to let the Indian government wind down military assets in uncontested border territory.

In any case, the Chinese government, interested in gauging the intentions of the Indian government, sent in 50 soldiers to pitch five tents at Rika Nullah. The Indian army sent in its soldiers to pitch its tents "eyeball to eyeball".

The stage is now set for Li Keqiang to meet with Manmohan Singh and find a satisfactory way out of this ridiculous dispute.

In the big scheme of things, China is probably quite keen for good relations with India. Japan is another matter, and the Senkaku dispute - over another chunk of unimportant real estate - is considerably more unsettling.

World diplomacy is realigning in President Barack Obama's second term. The confrontational "pivot to Asia" is morphing into a "rebalancing" the makes a place for China inside the structure where together with India as observers they can ponder a more alarming case of deja vu than Indian nationalists' desire for a do-over on the 1962 war: the parallels between Germany in the 1930s and Shinzo Abe's Japan today.

This is not to say that Prime Minister Abe is a genocidal maniac determined to ignite a catastrophic world war. It is to say that some of the imperatives and opportunities that informed Germany back then and are also present in Japan today - ones that can be addressed without recourse to personalities, thereby avoiding indictment under Godwin's Law (the tongue-in-cheek rule that any Internet discussion of contemporary events invoking the name of a certain German dictator is prima facie discredited).

Consider that in its place in the international order Japan today is pretty much at the same spot Germany was in 1933: ready to shed the disarmament restrictions imposed by its conquerors (Versailles Treaty for Germany and the pacifist constitution for Japan) and reassume its role as a full-fledged (and unrestrained) member of the global community.

Impatience with foreign impositions is exacerbated by economic malaise created by the same group of foreigners who are gumming up the military works (Great Depression for Germany; Great Recession for Japan) and the concurrent transformation of a large but impoverished and dysfunctional neighbor into a rapidly growing and threatening force (the USSR for Germany; the PRC for Japan).

With the old order discredited, national rebirth becomes a matter of urgency and is heralded by a leader determined to throw off the restraints that have been shackling the military and economy, and swagger across the world stage in a manner that gratifies and electrifies the nation (he-who-must-not-be-named for Germany, Shinzo Abe for Japan).

Vulnerable territories are protected (Rhineland for Germany, Senkakus for Japan) and lost ones recovered (Saar for Germany, the Soviet-occupied Kuriles, maybe, for Japan). A risky and balance-sheet busting economic stimulus program (with a healthy military component) is enacted to translate the perfection of sovereignty and national spirit into national vitality (Germany's massive exercise in Keynesian stimulus and Japan's "Abenomics").

A newly assertive foreign policy requires strengthened alliances to deal with the big unfriendly neighbor (the Anti-Comintern pact for Germany and the US pivot architecture for Japan).

Of course, the parallels are far from complete. Unlike Nazi Germany, the redefined Japan is not preparing to embark on a ruinous quest for Lebensraum and racial reintegration through conquest. Nor does Japan consider itself existentially threatened by alien forces within its own social polity.

But then again, anxious and newly empowered nationalism frequently finds a domestic target.

On April 30, the Asahi Shimbun (which has displayed a notable dislike for things Abe) got around to reporting on the ugly fallout in Tokyo - in January - surrounding Okinawan opposition to US basing on the island:

A sidewalk in Tokyo's Ginza district was crowded with people waving Hinomaru rising-sun flags and jockeying for the best position to yell their insults and curses.

That moment came when demonstrators from Okinawa Prefecture, including mayors, assembly members and labor unionists, marched by to protest the deployment of MV-22 Osprey transport aircraft to a U.S. military base in the southern prefecture.

"You traitors," the roadside people screamed during the march on Jan. 27.

"Get out of Japan," was another common cry.

A women's group called Soyokaze (Breath of wind) and other organizations had urged people to discourage the protest by the Okinawans. Videos of the march later spread around the Internet, prompting a deluge of racist comments and conspiracy theories.

Many of the posters said the Okinawans were deliberately trying to weaken Japan's defenses and give China the upper hand in the territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Typical comments were "left-wingers in Okinawa are Chinese spies" and the protesters are "receiving funding from China." ...

... [A woman who attacked the march in an on-line post] said that during a time when outside threats against Japan are increasing, such demonstrations cast a pall over the Japan-U.S. security arrangement and serve the interests of China. She also said she believes China has funded anti-U.S. base activities in Okinawa Prefecture. ...

... Others believe Koreans are behind the anti-U.S. base sentiment in Okinawa Prefecture.

A man in his 40s posted a message that said, "People who are protesting the Osprey are ethnic Korean residents in Japan." ...

... Takeshi Taira, 51, a deputy managing editor of the Okinawa Times [said] the feelings toward Okinawa have become hostile.

"It is distinctly different from what I thought Japan's mainland is like," he said.

The Okinawa Times had planned to distribute about 1,000 copies of a special edition opposing the Osprey at the demonstration site in Ginza. The newspaper scrapped that idea because it could not secure the safety of its employees. [3]

While we're addressing the issue of ideological mobilization in the service of redefined (but not yet universally accepted) national goals, there's also this:

Riding high in the opinion polls and buoyed by big stock market gains, Abe has grown more outspoken about his conservative agenda, including revising the constitution and being less apologetic about Japan's wartime past - a stance that has frayed already tense relations with China and South Korea, where memories of Tokyo's past militarism run deep.

Many Japanese conservatives see the constitution, unchanged since its adoption in 1947 during the U.S.-led Allied Occupation, as an embodiment of Western-style, individualistic mores they believe eroded Japan's group-oriented traditions.

Critics see Abe's plan to ease requirements for revising the charter and then seek to change Article 9 as a "stealth" strategy that keeps his deeper aims off the public radar.

"The real concern is that a couple of years later, we move to a redefinition of a 'new Japan' as an authoritarian, nationalist order," said Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman.

The LDP draft, approved by the party last year, would negate the basic concept of universal human rights, which Japanese conservatives argue is a Western notion ill-suited to Japan's traditional culture and values, constitutional scholars say.

"The current constitution ... provides protection for a long list of fundamental rights - freedom of expression, freedom of religion," said Meiji University professor Lawrence Repeta. "It's clear the leaders of the LDP and certain other politicians in Japan ... are passionately against a system that protects individual rights to that degree."

The draft deletes a guarantee of basic human rights and prescribes duties, such as submission to an undefined "public interest and public order". The military would be empowered to maintain that "public order." [4]

It should be pointed out that constitutional revision is not especially popular in Japan.

The key "bombs away" revision, which would entail altering Article 9 to permit "collective self defense", ie military operations on behalf of an ally when Japan itself is not under attack, was opposed by 56% of respondents in a recent Asahi poll, and supported by only 33%. (Japan under Abe has already claimed the right to send troops overseas to evacuate Japanese nationals, and to engage in pre-emptive attack in national self defense. Thankfully, enshrining "unprovoked aggression" as a Japanese constitutional right is not on the agenda, at least for now. [5])

However, revising the constitution is more a matter of political determination, not national will.

Prime Minister Abe is looking for a big win in the upper house elections in July in order to translate his current popularity into an overall two-thirds LDP super-majority. Then the LDP can push through a bill allowing the constitution to be revised by only a majority vote - something that will perhaps serve it in good stead especially if the Abenomics and Senkaku chickens come home to roost earlier than expected and the LDP's political dominance erodes.

Given his high personal popularity levels and the disarray of the opposition, Abe doesn't have to burn down the Reichstag to attain a dominant position in Japanese politics. However, the nationalist pot must be kept boiling, so don't expect things to quiet down on the Senkaku and Dokdo and Yasukuni fronts in the run-up to the elections.

The point is not that 21st century Japan is 1930s Germany. The point is that a combination of time, malaise, threats, opportunities, politics, and ambition have unleashed forces that, for good or ill (well, frankly, mainly for good), were kept bottled up for over half a century.

Thanks to a well-founded anxiety over China's rise, ineluctable US marginalization, and Japan's relative decline, Japan's conservatives are leading an effort to redefine Japan's national polity and international role in a way that is potentially more destabilizing than that traditional bugbear, "Rising China".

It is a time of national urgency and political flux, a chance for leaders with strong and not necessarily popular views to act boldly if not rashly to seize the political initiative, define the national agenda, and set the direction for the country at a crucial point in its history before time, circumstance, and elections combine to shut the window of opportunity.

And a combination of risky policies, untested leaders, unformed public opinion, powerful interests, and a dangerous strategic and economic environment could lead to unpleasant outcomes beyond the directionless dithering we've come to expect of Japan in the last decade.

China's dustup over Ladakh may be viewed as potentially stabilizing as the PRC and its neighbors develop the economic, military, and diplomatic tools to formalize control of what they already have and manage disputes that have been bubbling along for decades.

However, if Prime Minister Abe succeeds in repositioning Japan as an independent power broker in Asia - in particular, by escalating Japanese support of Philippine, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese resistance to Chinese pretensions to include military backing - the regional status quo could be upset and these disputes have the potential to be much more disruptive than the old, familiar, and often meaningless bilateral frictions between China and its neighbors.

Ironically, the prospect of Japan - an imminent nuclear weapons power-- actually putting some teeth into the US posturing that China's island disputes should be multi-lateralized appears to be giving the Obama administration and US media some significant collywobbles.

Even if World War III is not on the agenda, Japan emerging as an independent force in Asia is bad news for the United States and its quest for relevance and control in the West Pacific. As a result, "pivoting", ie "Asian democracies - plus Vietnam - equals soft containment of China" seems to be out. "Rebalancing", ie a condominium of regional powers including China, seems to be in.

"Managing Japan", I believe, is also in, as a potential area of shared US and Chinese concern and rapprochement. [6]

Japan's assertive posture vis a vis South Korea has also been a godsend to the PRC in its effort to cement economic and strategic relations with the ROK. China is on the alert to go on the diplomatic counteroffensive and promote an alternative to the unfavorable narrative of "Chinese bully" that has dominated East Asian discourse for the last few years.

"Developments concerning Japan are closely watched by its Asian neighboring countries for historical reasons," Hua Chunying told a regular press conference in Beijing on Thursday, responding to a reporter's question on Japanese leaders' recent comments on historical issues. She also expressed hope that Japan could adhere to peaceful development and take history as a mirror.

"History is like a mirror," Hua said, adding that one could truly embrace the future only after honestly facing the past. [7]

Let us hope and expect that history's mirror in the upcoming decade reflects something better than the 1940s.

Notes:
1. See Associated Press, May 02, 2013.
2. See Times of India, May 1, 2013.
3. See Asahi Shimbun, April 30, 2013.
4. See Reuters, May 1, 2013.
5. See Asahi Shimbun, May 2, 2013.
6. See China Matters, April 26, 2013.
7. See Xinhuanet, May 2, 2013.