Ultimately, the media allegations of a sharp increase in cross-border shelling, a big military build-up and the killing of two Indo-Tibetan Border Police jawans proved false, according to the Prime Minister, National Security Adviser, Foreign Secretary, and the Army Chief. They made special public statements within a span of 48 hours to allay fears. Army chief Deepak Kapoor said there has been no increase in shelling (which both sides unfortunately but routinely indulge in from time to time), and appealed to the media not to “overplay” the story.

Where did the media get its stories from? How did it conclude that “the India-China theatre is a hotbed of activity; Chinese intrusions are on the rise; and as China intensifies its military build-up, India is huffing and puffing to catch up…”? Clearly, someone in the government briefed the media. The media quoted “unnamed sources”, but never verified a single story. Such verification is admittedly difficult because the India-China Line of Actual Control (LAC) is a prohibited area. But it's possible to corroborate and cross-check accounts from different sources, including the ITBP, the civil administration, and the Army. However, the media swallowed whatever it was fed—and regurgitated it, garnished with prejudice.

Spreading lies and whipping up bellicose sentiments is condemnable. But no less deplorable is the role of the media's “sources” within a split Establishment. By all indications, these were intelligence agencies, with narrow political agendas, mutual rivalries, and scores to settle with the parent ministries, the Army, and their own colleagues. This makes matters murkier. The agencies are extremely powerful, yet far less transparent and accountable to any wing of the government than the armed forces. It's distressing that they should plant patently false stories in order to torpedo any improvement in Sino-Indian relations.

The Army has recently done its utmost to scuttle a settlement of the Siachen glacier dispute with Pakistan. When this seemed imminent last year, it flew defence journalists to Siachen and declared that it wouldn't withdraw from the glacier until its positions were authenticated. Such a veto blatantly violates the elementary requirement that civilian authority is supreme in democracy and must always prevail over the armed forces on policy matters. That's bad enough. It would be far worse if shadowy intelligence agencies sabotaged what the political leadership set out to do. War hysteria is particularly dangerous when both China and India are planning large-scale military exercises near the LAC.

Media hype about China's incursions strengthens the hawks who believe that China poses a grave threat to India, which must be countered—not diplomatically, but militarily, by creating a massive infrastructure of roads and airfields along the 4,000 kilometres-long border, and deploying huge military capacities there. India has just opened an aircraft-landing ground in Ladakh, barely 23 km from the LAC. This is the third airstrip made operational in 17 months.

The build-up under way threatens to undermine the gains from two major Sino-Indian agreements signed in 1993 and 1996 for Peace and Tranquillity along the LAC and measures to prohibit threatening manoeuvres. Under them, India could redeploy as many as one lakh troops away from the border and effect huge savings. The opposite may now happen.

Worse, hostile military preparations could reverse the progress made in 13 rounds of Sino-Indian talks on border issues and on economic, cultural and scientific cooperation, and ignite a terrible arms race in which China and India lose both money and security. India's loss will be greater and harder to absorb. China is three times bigger in economic size, and militarily, considerably more powerful. But our hawks want to continue fighting the 1962 war. They're convinced that China is an expansionist power intent on making life difficult for India. China has gained a foothold in our neighbourhood and frowns at India's nuclear-weapons status.

This view is at best partly true—and dangerously wrong. China is not an expansionist power, leave alone a revolutionary one which wants to radically alter global/regional power balances. Or else, it would have annexed Taiwan. China is preoccupied with sustaining its rapid economic growth and managing its growing social problems.

True, China is building modern ports at Gwadar on Pakistan's Makran coast and also at Hambantota in Sri Lanka. But this may not be a “String-of-Pearls-to-Encircle-India” stratagem. Hambantota was first offered to India for development. India refused. And Gwadar is as much a commercial project as a military one. India too seeks global power projection and influence through a blue-waters navy, and through military arrangements with the United States, Australia and Japan, and with the Southeast and Central Asian states.

China does have problems with India's claims to Arunachal Pradesh and periodically rakes them up. But its recent attempt to stop an Asian Development Bank loan for an Arunachal project failed. As Foreign Secretary Rao said, the loan was sanctioned and “that's where the matter stands”. China isn't happy with India's nuclear weapons programme. (Is India happy with China's or Pakistan's?) But it cannot undo it—short of mutual progress towards nuclear disarmament. China has had nuclear weapons since 1964. India has learnt to live with them and didn't protest repeated Chinese nuclear tests for 30 years.

China helped Pakistan's nuclear and missiles programmes. But that was partly in reaction to India's 1974 nuclear test and driven by long-standing Sino-Pakistan strategic collaboration to counter Indo-Soviet military cooperation. Besides, India now has a strategic partnership with the world's greatest power, the US.

This doesn't argue that China is a benign power, only that we must not make a bugbear out of it and abandon diplomatic options for reconciliation. This means putting the 1962 war in perspective. The war is an already-faded memory in China. As I found in my two visits there, Chinese policy-makers, leave alone ordinary people, don't even remember it. The war happened over a frontier which the departing British colonists left undefined. Free India inherited the border dispute with China, but basically refused to negotiate it. Instead, India asserted the British Empire's minimalist or outermost claims, like the McMahon Line.

As the Chinese saw it, this was one of the many boundary disputes that the People's Republic inherited at its birth in 1948 with numerous countries, including the USSR, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, Burma, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam and Laos. Beijing peacefully negotiated border treaties with all except India and Vietnam.

India's border claims are less clear and unambiguous than most of us have been led to believe. They're largely based on British plans to expand their Empire and on contested notions of nationality, ethnicity, traditional frontiers, culture, language, etc. (A highly informed, scholarly but not entirely unbiased account is provided by Neville Maxwell in India's China War. Maxwell, a British journalist posted in India, had the advantage most Indians lack—access to the official Henderson Brooks report on the causes of India's rout in 1962.) China, for its part, laid claim to distant ethnic-minority areas that weren't fully annexed by the Middle Kingdom.

Conflict became inevitable as India and China pressed their rival claims. India launched its Forward Policy in 1961, leading to skirmishes and gunfire exchanges. In October 1962, as India was preparing for an offensive, China launched a pre-emptive attack. India's border posts were wiped out and most Indian battalions simply dissolved.

China declared a unilateral ceasefire in November and moved back its troops 20 kilometres behind the McMahon Line. It's noteworthy that its army didn't take prisoners although it could easily have. Instead, it facilitated the return of Indian soldiers. It returned guns seized from them after cleaning and polishing them! China made a successful punitive expedition. And then it stopped.

India and China resumed border talks after a long interval and have reportedly made considerable progress on a “package deal”. But the Indian government hasn't disclosed anything about this. Nor has it released the Henderson Brooks report. Nationalist prejudice and paranoia about the “Chinese threat” have been allowed to fill the knowledge vacuum.

All kinds of lobbies have flourished in India which stoke anti-China prejudices and demand confrontation and “retaliation”. These include former diplomats who want a strong US-India alliance to counter China; retired soldiers unreconciled to the 1962 “humiliation”; and of course, the sangh parivar, with a long history of Sinophobia and allying with the West during the Cold War. The parivar sees China as an enemy in Clash-of-Civilisations terms. These lobbies must not be allowed to hijack the China-India agenda and spread paranoia. We must give patient diplomacy and cooperation a chance. (IPA Service)