Bordering on strategy?

The government’s in-principle approval of a rail link to Leh in Jammu and Kashmir through the Rohtang pass in Himachal Pradesh, reported by this newspaper yesterday, is welcome; but it does not necessarily confirm that the government is all set to match the rapid expansion and modernisation of Chinese transport infrastructure across the border. To be sure, the Leh railroad proposal follows a series of other announcements by the UPA government over the last few years on promoting greater road and rail connectivity between India’s sensitive border regions and the heartland. When he travelled earlier this year to Arunachal Pradesh, which is claimed in its entirety by China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced an ambitious plan to connect the state to itself and the rest of the country. Similar plans have also been approved for the north-eastern region as a whole. The Indian armed forces too have decided to refurbish a range of facilities that have been lying unused for decades all along the Sino-Indian border.

Taken together, these decisions do indicate that New Delhi is waking up to India’s greatest national security challenge — the rise of China. This is largely due to a persistent initiative from a small section of the bureaucracy and unrelenting pressures from the state governments of the border-states that were more sensitive to the local demands for connectivity. China’s emergence as a great power, show-cased last weekend by the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, should never have been an abstract proposition for India. New Delhi should have been quicker in seeing the more immediate implications of China’s rise from the in-your-face transformation of its borderlands over the last two decades.

New Delhi’s delayed response involved overcoming two entrenched national security assumptions. One was the belief that keeping the border regions underdeveloped would deny them to China in a future conflict. The other was a conscious choice to limit the integration of the border regions with the nation by constraining citizens’ access through an outdated system of inner-line permits. If the former reflected military timidity, the latter underlined the home ministry’s colonial mindset. The UPA deserves two cheers for forcing a rethink of these assumptions. We would offer a third when it delivers on implementation and begins a debate on scrapping inner-line permits for Indian citizens. Waking up to China’s rise, after all, is not the same as gearing up.