Why The Chinese Army Seems Happy To Cause Offence Over Kashmir

Some bickering broke out this week after China refused a visa to Lieutenant-General BS Jaswal, who is chief of India’s northern command and was supposed to attend high-level defence talks in Beijing. Ostensibly, the reason seems to be that Jaswal is in charge of the disputed region of Kashmir, but as Manuj Joshi  in Mail Today has pointed out [they only have an e-paper: you can find the article on page 8], this does not make a lot of sense since the Chinese were happy to invite Lt-Gen VK Singh last August, and he’s in charge of the eastern command which includes Arunachal Pradesh, a state claimed in its entirety by China and over which the two countries fought a vicious war over in 1962.

The important point, Joshi argues, is that the decision to deny the visa came from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), not the government, suggesting the army is increasingly taking foreign policy matters into its own hands.

Communist armies, and the PLA was no exception, were run through a dual authority system in which political commissars were attached to all formations at all levels to ensure ideological purity and to keep an eye on the military commanders. The professionalisation and modernisation of the PLA have led to a widening gap between the commissars and the military men in the PLA who are better educated and easily see through the party cant.

The PLA sees Kashmir as a vital part of achieving strategic regional dominance, since it provides an easy way of ensuring co-operation with Pakistan (on top of all the aid and nuclear trading), and a highly symbolic way of pressuring India, which hates anyone interfering in Kashmir. It is not only the army that are milking this issue – the Chinese government last year started issuing special paper visas for Indian citizens from Kashmir, suggesting they did not fully recognise them as Indian citizens.

But obstructing fairly routine and anodyne defence talks does not seem to fit with the general rapprochement the Chinese government has sought with India over the past decade (China is now India’s largest export market and bilateral trade is set to exceed $60 billion this year). Indeed, India has been quick to say that this does not affect broader diplomacy.

One key reason for the dispute may lie in some activity going on in a remote northwestern corner of Kashmir. The New York Times is reporting the PLA’s effective take-over of Gilgit-Baltistan from Pakistani control. It’s an area where no media are allowed, and where the Pakistani government has long suppressed local attempts to establish autonomy. The PLA apparently has up to 11,000 soldiers in the region building roads, railways and other infrastructure that will give it direct access to the naval bases China is developing in Pakistan at Gwador, Pasni and Ormara. The author, Selig Harrison, takes a very dim view of Chinese intentions, which he describes as a “behemoth” seeking to overwhelm South Asia, but it is hard to refute the advantages China would gain from developing this route, which he says would cut transport times to the Gulf down from 16-25 days to around 48 hours.

In observing the inscrutable goings-on of Chinese politics, it is always difficult to judge where real decision-making lies, but these latest reports show the extent to which China’s strategic interests have the potential to rile India, and are being carried out by an increasingly autonomous military that is unconcerned about causing offence.

Comments

[jamie]

political commissars were attached to all formations at all levels to ensure ideological purity and to keep an eye on the military commanders. The professionalisation and modernisation of the PLA have led to a widening gap between the commissars and the military men in the PLA who are better educated and easily see through the party cant.

AFAIK, it doesn't work like that. Commissars aren't political numpties brought into ride herd over professional soldiers. The role is an integral part of the PLA command chain. An ambitious officer will rotate into and out of that position as part of his career development. There is a wider debate about "nationalisation" of the PLA - in this sense about whether it should report to the state rather than the Party - but I don't see any evidence that the PLA wants to break from party control or that it's running foreign policy.

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