Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted that the Chinese army, time and again, keeps making incursions into Indian territory. He has made no dramatic announcement. Any regular reader of an Indian newspaper knows this.
India has always acted with restraint. Many political pundits say this is because India is scared of picking a fight with China and that after the drubbing we got in 1962, we tend to shiver in our boots at Chinese aggressive tendencies. They advise us to become more tough and aggressive ourselves.
All this far from the truth. India has refused to react unduly to Chinese pinpricking, not because it is afraid of Chinese might, but because India is matured. It knows that wars and fights between nations solve nothing. This is not a newly acquired wisdom. It is in the collective Indian blood since the dawn of Indian civilization.
It is not that that India does not have the aggressive instinct; it is tempered with wisdom which is uniquely Indian. We have had many fighter kings and emperors: Chandraguta Maurya, Ashok, Samudragupta, Akbar, the rulers of Cholas and Chalukyas dynasty in the south, Maharana Pratap, Ranjit Singh and Shivaji. The list is endless. Each of them were no less than say, Alexander or Chengis Khan; the fact is they were too civilized to become like the foreign conquerors.
India is no dumbo where international politics is concerned. It has the guile and wisdon of Chanakya, who was arguably a better and shrewder political scientist than Machiavelli.
India does not believe in conquering the territory of foreign countries; it believes in conquering their hearts. Emperor Ashok invaded many countries; not their lands but their minds. I talk of the spread of Buddhism by the emperor.
China should not delude itself that because it thrashed India once (in 1962) it can do so again. In 1962 Indian soldiers did not have weapons; they were not properly organized. It was the weakness of political leadership; the quality of the Indian army is and will remain unequalled.
Nehru was not weak. He believed too much in Panchsheel. China should remember that India has a big heart. It had acted the perfect host to Chinese travellers like Fahein and Hueng Tsang. But it can, if necessary, beat the daylights out of invaders. Remember Kargil.
