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Battle of Galwan: When a Bollywood Trailer Got China Nervous
You can never tell what will excite social media and in the case of China’s Weibo, which is state-controlled, the mandarins may find even obscure developments of use to them.
This is not to suggest the Battle of Galwan is obscure. This Bollywood production starring Salman Khan as Col. Santosh Babu, commanding officer of the 16th battalion of the Bihar Regiment, who was killed by PLA troops in the Galwan valley in an unjustified attack, is scheduled for release in April 2026 and is widely expected to perform well (meaning heat up anti-China sentiment), which explains Weibo’s interest.
China’s state-run Global Times (GT) has dismissed the film as “exaggerated”, claiming it is a “one-sided portrayal” of an event which threw bilateral relations into the deep freeze for four years. It said the film would “stir nationalist sentiment rather than reflecting historical facts”.
Beijing’s Self-Serving Critique
The criticism appears rather self-serving given how the mandarins have repeatedly used the media to drum up nationalist sentiment whether against India or even Japan, Taiwan, the US to name a few.
GT then quoted various Chinese experts as saying that Indian troops crossed the Line of Actual Control first and stressed that cinematic drama cannot weaken “the PLA’s resolve to defend its territorial claims”.
That was enough to get Weibo going: verified accounts openly mocked the film, accusing India of distorting history. One post sneered that India “still hasn’t been beaten enough” and was back to twisting facts.
Another argued that if China does not put forward its own narrative, international audiences exposed primarily to Indian films may end up accepting that version of events. This helps explain why a verified Weibo handle run by the Shanghai Han Weiyang Traditional Culture Promotion Centre published a post on December 30 titled “An Epic of Heroes from the Galwan Valley,” adopting an overtly emotive and nationalist tone.
It framed the valley as a strategically decisive frontier, and PLA soldiers as “resolute guardians of sovereignty”, rather dramatically describing them as “Han soldiers are like the sun and moon, shining over frost and snow; looking back, all enemies are swept away.” (Screenshot below)
Some bloggers also shared images from the Galwan border zone showing a slogan carved onto a mountainside (screenshot below), which reads, “Magnificent rivers and mountains not an inch of land will be yielded.” Commonly used in official and popular discourse, the slogan reflects the idea that every part of the country’s territory is non-negotiable and must be defended without compromise.
Another verified Weibo blogger reflected a Chinese fear: “The Indian fantasy film ‘Battle of Galwan’ has released its trailer once again pushing a self-gratifying storyline where one man takes on hundreds. Honestly, we should make our own film too. If we don’t tell the facts ourselves, most people will only see Indian movies and quite a few will actually believe the Indian version.”
The last reflects a point made earlier here, that given China’s low international credibility driven largely by state-controlled media prone to purveying propaganda, don’t rule out a Beijing riposte to Bollywood’s Galwan.
Battle Of The Begums And Khaleda Zia’s India Legacy
Begum Khaleda Zia, the first woman to serve as prime minister of Bangladesh, has died at the age of 80, leaving behind a complex legacy in her nation’s politics and in South Asia’s diplomatic history.
As the long-time leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Zia shaped Bangladesh’s domestic life for over three decades and played a defining role in Dhaka’s relations with its giant neighbour, India — a relationship marked by periods of strain, cautious cooperation, and mutual diplomatic regard even amid deep political differences.
Born 15 August 1945 in Jalpaiguri, then part of British India, Khaleda Zia’s early years were rooted in a shared South Asian past before partition reshaped the subcontinent. Her family moved to Dinajpur in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) after 1947, embodying the complex human history that underlies modern India-Bangladesh ties.
Zia entered politics reluctantly after the assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, in 1981. Taking the reins of the BNP—a party he had founded—she transformed herself from political novice to one of the most formidable leaders in Bangladesh. She led the nation as prime minister three times across the 1990s and early 2000s, spearheading the return to parliamentary democracy and implementing key domestic reforms.
Yet, her relationship with India was complex, shifting between cooperation, suspicion, and strategic distancing — reflecting both ideological differences and geopolitical realignments in the region.
The broader arc of Khaleda Zia’s career was dominated by her intense rivalry with Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League. Known as the “Battle of the Begums,” this rivalry shaped Bangladeshi politics for decades and coloured perceptions in New Delhi, where the Awami League was often viewed as a more familiar partner due to its historic ties with India.
During her early years in power, Zia and the BNP cultivated a foreign policy that was notably cautious towards India. This stance was shaped in part by her party’s ideological orientation and historical concerns about India’s influence in Bangladesh’s internal affairs. The BNP’s foreign policy under Khaleda often emphasized balancing relations with multiple powers — including the Muslim world, the West, and China — and was sceptical of undue Indian influence.
As one academic analysis notes, elements within Khaleda Zia’s leadership at times held India responsible for broader regional dynamics that they viewed as unfavourable, and this perception influenced Dhaka’s diplomatic posture in the 1990s.
During this period, ties with India were tense, particularly over trade imbalances, water sharing, and border management issues. While Bangladesh and India had established formal diplomatic relations after 1971, lingering mistrust often undercut deeper cooperation when Khaleda’s BNP was in power.
But despite ideological reservations, Khaleda Zia did undertake high-level engagement with India. Official visits to New Delhi and meetings with Indian leaders were part of the diplomatic routine, even as her government maintained a cautious approach to bilateral issues. Reports from past research show that her visits often included discussions on critical matters like water sharing, trade, and border agreements — matters that remain central to India-Bangladesh relations.
These interactions highlighted the pragmatic side of her leadership. Even when the BNP’s rhetoric was wary, practical diplomacy continued. For example, during visits and negotiations, Indian officials engaged with her government on issues of mutual concern, seeking to bridge gaps while advancing cooperation.
The longstanding rivalry between Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina profoundly influenced Bangladesh’s internal politics and, by extension, its foreign relations. The two leaders alternated power for decades in a deeply polarized political landscape. India traditionally maintained a closer relationship with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, whose party roots traced back to the Bangladeshi independence movement of 1971.
In contrast, the BNP’s nationalist ideology and its alliance with more conservative forces in Bangladesh made India more cautious about deep strategic engagement during Khaleda’s tenures. Over time, this divergence shaped the character of India-Bangladesh relations, with cooperative thrusts often occurring under Awami League governments and cooler phases under BNP leadership.
In her later years, as Khaleda Zia’s health deteriorated and she stepped back from active politics, overtures between India and the BNP leadership took on new significance. In 2025, amidst broader shifts in Dhaka’s political landscape, there were signs that India was exploring ways to broaden ties beyond traditional allies. Reports from recent weeks suggest that messages and gestures from Indian leadership to Khaleda Zia while she was ailing were interpreted by some analysts as India’s attempt to foster goodwill with the BNP ahead of pivotal elections.
These gestures hinted at a diplomatic evolution, where bilateral relations might transcend the personal rivalries of Bangladesh’s two most prominent political families. Such moves underscored the enduring importance New Delhi places on stable, multifaceted ties with Dhaka — irrespective of which party leads Bangladesh.
Khaleda Zia’s legacy in India-Bangladesh relations is neither straightforward nor uniformly adversarial. Instead, it reflects the ebb and flow of geopolitical and domestic calculations: early scepticism tempered by pragmatic diplomacy, ideological caution counterbalanced by mutual interests, and later attempts at rapprochement amid changing political currents.
Her political path — from reluctant entry into politics to decades at the centre of power — illustrates how personal leadership and national strategy can intersect with regional relationships. For India, her tenure was a reminder that Dhaka’s foreign policy orientation would often be shaped by internal political dynamics as much as by external factors.
As South Asia contemplates the impact of her passing, Khaleda Zia’s life offers a lens on the complexities of Bangladesh’s engagement with India — marked by wariness, negotiation, competition, and ultimately recognition that stable ties between neighbouring democracies are essential for peace and prosperity in the region.
Her death not only marks the end of a defining chapter in Bangladeshi politics but also invites reflection on the evolving nature of India-Bangladesh cooperation in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.
2025 Ends India’s Strategic Comfort Zone
If 2024 was about political mandate, 2025 was the year India’s external environment stripped away remaining illusions. The neighbourhood grew more competitive, great-power pressure became more explicit, and strategic ambiguity proved less forgiving.
The most consequential recalibration unfolded with the United States. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington early in the year reaffirmed strategic continuity, but old frictions quickly returned. The second Trump presidency reintroduced a bluntly transactional tone. Tariff threats resurfaced, underscoring that strategic convergence does not shield partners from economic leverage.
More politically sensitive were repeated claims by Donald Trump that Washington had “brokered” calm between India and Pakistan. The Prime Minister went to Parliament and denied any such role—effectively calling the US president a liar. The denial was necessary, but the optics were costly.
The real question is not whether Trump exaggerated—he often does—but whether India misjudged how little narrative restraint this White House would exercise, even with long-standing partners.
That misreading mattered because it intersected with a deeper shift. The US resumed limited engagement with Pakistan—not as a pivot or favour, but as a contingency hedge. Washington once again signalled that it would keep multiple South Asian channels open, regardless of Indian discomfort.
Despite this friction, Indo-US defence and technology cooperation continued to move forward. Co-production discussions, advanced platform access, jet-engine collaboration, space coordination, and semiconductor supply-chain initiatives progressed precisely because they were insulated from headline politics.
If the US relationship required balance, ties with Russia demanded calibration.
President Vladimir Putin’s December visit to India for the annual summit reaffirmed defence and energy cooperation, signalling continuity despite Western pressure. For Moscow, India remains a critical partner; for New Delhi, Russia remains a reliable friend, but not the only one.
At the same time, 2025 made the costs of that relationship more explicit. Western scrutiny of India’s Russian oil purchases and legacy defence dependence persisted, pushing India to accelerate diversification rather than posture defiance. The visit sent a deliberate message: India would not abandon old partnerships to validate new ones, but neither would it mortgage future flexibility to sentiment.
Defence ties with France deepened further, building on earlier fighter and submarine cooperation. New deals and follow-on negotiations covering aircraft, naval platforms, and advanced munitions reinforced Paris’s position as India’s most politically reliable Western defence partner, less prone to sanctions pressure or strategic conditionality.
Perhaps the clearest marker of India’s strategic maturation came not from imports, but exports.
BrahMos missile sales gathered momentum in 2025 as India positioned the system as a credible deterrence tool for friendly regional states. The 2023 delivery of the first BrahMos batch to the Philippines was a watershed. If ongoing negotiations with Vietnam and Indonesia conclude, the significance will go well beyond revenue—signalling India’s arrival as a selective but serious defence exporter capable of shaping regional military balances.
All of this unfolded against the unchanging backdrop of China. Border talks continued without resolution—and crucially, without expectation. There was no Modi–Xi reset and no informal summitry. India’s force posture along the LAC normalised permanence; infrastructure acceleration became routine. China is no longer a crisis to be managed, but a condition to be planned around.
This hardening forced India into a delicate global juggling act—deepening security coordination within the Quad while preparing for BRICS chairmanship, navigating debates on de-dollarisation, and absorbing the turbulence unleashed by Trump’s disruptive approach to trade, alliances, and institutions.
Strategic autonomy in 2025 was no longer about balance for its own sake, but about surviving a stressed system without being pulled into another power’s orbit.
That realism filtered into India’s neighbourhood policy. With Pakistan, deterrence replaced dialogue. With Bangladesh, political uncertainty was met with non-partisan engagement and institutional continuity.
In Nepal, nationalist rhetoric was countered not with rebuttal but with electricity exports, connectivity, and patience. In Sri Lanka, India stepped out of the spotlight as Colombo stabilised, confident that delivery had earned credibility.
India’s neighbourhood is no longer a comfort zone. Its great-power relationships—especially with the US, Russia, and France—are no longer ideological anchors but calibrated instruments.
Strategic autonomy, once a slogan, has become a discipline enforced by hard choices.
Next: India’s Next Test Is Strategic Choice
How China Is Preparing To Control India, Not Fight It
India keeps asking the wrong question about China.
The question is not whether Beijing is preparing for war with India. The question is whether India is prepared for a strategy designed to weaken it without one.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2025 assessment of China’s military development offers an uncomfortable answer. China is not building its armed forces for dramatic battlefield victories alone. It is building them to impose control while keeping escalation firmly on its own terms. Slowly, persistently, and across multiple domains.
The Pentagon report makes clear that while Taiwan remains China’s primary military contingency, the strategy guiding the People’s Liberation Army is not geographically limited. Beijing’s approach integrates military power with cyber operations, space surveillance, logistics dominance, and political signalling. It is meant to shape behaviour, not just defeat armies.
India has already been living under this strategy since 2020. Along the Line of Actual Control, China has not sought a decisive clash. Instead, it has imposed prolonged pressure—forward deployments, infrastructure build-up, episodic disengagement, followed by fresh friction. The pattern confuses outside observers because it is not meant to resolve the dispute. It is meant to manage it in China’s favour.
The Pentagon’s assessment explains why. Beijing treats territorial claims, including those against India, as “core interests” tied to regime legitimacy. That framing leaves little space for compromise. China’s military reforms reflect this logic. The report highlights improvements in joint command, logistics, mobilisation systems, cyber warfare, and space-based surveillance.
These are not tools designed for a short Himalayan war. They are tools designed for endurance—for sustaining pressure over years rather than winning battles in weeks.
What China is attempting along the LAC today resembles, in form if not scale, the Cold War practice of creeping pressure along contested frontiers in Europe—Berlin included—where the objective was not invasion but exhaustion. The goal was to normalise disadvantage, to make resistance costly and accommodation tempting, without triggering open conflict.
Cyber and space are central to this strategy. The Pentagon describes China as the most persistent cyber threat it faces, noting intrusions into critical infrastructure networks. These operations are assessed not merely as spying, but as preparation for disruption during crises. India’s power grids, communications systems, ports, and defence networks are not immune to the same methods.
Space poses an even quieter risk. China now operates hundreds of surveillance satellites, giving it the ability to monitor military movements across land and sea. The report also details China’s development of counter-space weapons: lasers, jammers, and other systems designed to disrupt satellites while controlling escalation. In a future India–China crisis, pressure may arrive not as artillery fire, but as sudden blindness.
The Pentagon assessment also sheds light on Beijing’s alternating posture toward New Delhi. Periods of military pressure are often followed by diplomatic engagement, border talks, and gestures of calm. As a Chinese analyst explained to this author long ago, the idea is to keep both your friends and your enemies guessing: “If you see a snarling dog with a wagging tail, which end do you believe?”
This is not inconsistency. U.S. analysts assess that China seeks to stabilise relations just enough to prevent deeper strategic alignment between India and the United States.
China’s growing partnership with Russia further complicates India’s strategic environment. The report describes Beijing as a critical enabler of Russia’s war effort through diplomatic backing and dual-use support. While this relationship stops short of a formal alliance, it weakens the assumption—still common in Delhi—that Moscow can act as a neutral balancer in Asian security dynamics.
None of this means war is inevitable. In fact, the Pentagon’s assessment suggests China is actively trying to avoid wars it cannot tightly control. Its expanding nuclear arsenal, long-range strike capabilities, and cyber forces are designed to deter intervention while applying pressure elsewhere.
Preparing for war is politically and institutionally easier than preparing for endurance. The real challenge India faces is whether it can sustain prolonged deployments, absorb economic and cyber disruptions, protect its space assets, and maintain political resolve when pressure is constant but casualties are low.
India is already operating inside the strategic framework China has built. The question is whether New Delhi recognises this in time—and whether it adapts its planning, partnerships, and investments accordingly. Control, after all, succeeds best when the target realises too late that the contest was never about war in the first place.
SHANTI Can Help India Reach 2070 Zero Emissions Goal: KN Vyas, Ex-AEC Chief
SHANTI or Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India is now law, parliament having passed it as the winter session wound to an end. How does it change India’s nuclear landscape?
KN Vyas, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said in an interview on The Gist that major issues drove these decisions.
“India has given a commitment that by 2070, we will be having net zero emissions. Then if you see our average electricity consumption per capita consumption, it is very low, it is even significantly lower than the world average. So if we want to achieve net zero and good human development index or good industrialization, we will need electricity.”
SHANTI will give space to private operators of nuclear facilities, and in the event of equipment malfunction, he has the right of recourse, to go to the manufacturer and demand compensation. An insurance pool will be built up that will take care of some of the compensation issues that arise.
Does SHANTI open the doors to foreign nuclear power majors? Yes it does, he said, and “there is no, restriction as to which type of reactors to be constructed. They can decide who gives them the best deal, which system they find it to be most suitable from their perspective. And, it should it should happen.”
But he warned that importing foreign reactors wholesale may prove costly and would increase the price at which power is generated, making the whole venture uneconomical. It may work better if parts of the imported reactor are made in India.
Mr Vyas was of the opinion that while Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) do have their advantages, especially if it comes to powering small townships or the requirement of an industrial cluster, these may not be practical when it comes to reaching the government target of 100 MW of power.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Kamlesh Vyas, former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
CIA Wrecked India–China Ties, But Won Nothing
Part I: How the CIA Provoked The 1962 Sino-India War
By the autumn of 1962, the India–China confrontation had already been decided long before the first shots were fired.
The Sino-India war that erupted across the Himalayas was not an impulsive reaction to a single provocation but the culmination of a decade in which Tibet became the lens through which Beijing interpreted every Indian action and every border movement. What followed on the battlefield, and what later vanished from public memory, cannot be understood without recognising that hidden prehistory.
The account of how the war was fought, interpreted, and later remembered is based on Indian Army war diaries, Chinese internal discussions released years later, and US diplomatic records declassified long after the conflict, as analysed in recent historical research by Lakshmana Kumar and colleagues and corroborated by US archival material cited in the Foreign Relations of the United States.
Chinese military action in October 1962 was framed internally not as a border correction but as a political signal. Chinese leaders repeatedly described the conflict as a necessary lesson—one aimed less at territory than at behaviour.
Declassified Chinese communications and later reconstructions show that Beijing believed India needed to be punished for what it saw as sustained interference in Tibet, regardless of India’s own understanding of its actions. The boundary dispute provided the legal and geographic justification, but Tibet supplied the motive.
This framing explains both the timing and the scale of the Chinese offensive. The attack came after years of border probes, diplomatic stalemate, and rising frustration in Beijing over the unresolved Tibetan question. It also came at a moment when Chinese leaders believed the international environment was permissive. The Soviet Union was openly split with China but unwilling to side decisively with India, while the United States—despite later expressions of sympathy—was not prepared to intervene militarily. The conditions for a sharp, limited war appeared favourable.
The conduct of the war reflected this logic. Chinese forces struck decisively, aiming to demonstrate overwhelming superiority rather than to occupy territory indefinitely. In several sectors, Indian troops fought stubbornly and inflicted significant casualties, facts later documented in Indian war diaries and military assessments. Yet these details mattered less to Beijing than the political outcome. The message, from China’s perspective, had been delivered.
The unilateral ceasefire announced by China in November 1962 reinforced this interpretation. Chinese forces withdrew from many forward positions despite having military momentum. This was not the behaviour of a state seeking territorial conquest. It was consistent with an operation designed to compel a change in behaviour and perception—to demonstrate costs rather than to redraw maps permanently.
For India, the consequences were devastating. Militarily, the shock exposed serious weaknesses in preparedness, logistics, and command. Politically, the war shattered confidence in leadership and accelerated a turn toward military modernisation and external security partnerships. Strategically, however, the deeper damage lay in the narrative that took hold almost immediately.
In the years that followed, the 1962 war was increasingly remembered as a straightforward humiliation—an ill-prepared India blundering into conflict with a superior China. This narrative, while containing elements of truth, stripped away context. Tibet receded into the background. The role of Cold War covert action vanished almost entirely from public discussion. Responsibility was localised, and history was simplified.
Several factors reinforced this erasure. First, the covert nature of the Tibetan operations ensured that critical information remained classified for decades. Second, personal memoirs and journalistic accounts written in the immediate aftermath focused on visible failures along the front, particularly in the eastern sector, where withdrawals were rapid and politically embarrassing. Third, international politics encouraged silence. As Washington sought rapprochement with Beijing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was little appetite to revisit actions that might complicate that process.
The result was a durable distortion. India’s defeat was explained largely in terms of its own errors, while the broader geopolitical pressures that shaped Chinese decision-making were marginalised. Tibet became a footnote. The Cold War disappeared. The war was nationalised, moralised, and simplified.
Yet the documentary record that has emerged over the past two decades challenges this version of events. Declassified American records, Chinese internal discussions released years later, and detailed Indian military reassessments all point to the same conclusion: the 1962 war cannot be separated from the covert struggle over Tibet. Chinese leaders did not view India in isolation. They viewed it through the prism of a perceived foreign-backed campaign against Chinese sovereignty.
This does not absolve Indian decision-makers of responsibility, nor does it deny genuine military and political failures. It does, however, explain why Chinese actions appeared disproportionate to Indian provocations, why diplomacy collapsed so completely, and why the war ended as abruptly as it began.
The conflict was never only about a line on a map. It was about signalling, punishment, and deterrence in a Cold War environment that treated regional actors as variables rather than partners.
The disappearance of this context had long-term consequences. It froze India–China relations into a cycle of mistrust that persists to this day. It shaped Indian strategic thinking in ways that often prioritised visible threats over hidden ones. And it allowed the architects of the covert war to escape scrutiny, even as the costs were borne locally.
Perhaps the most enduring irony is that the strategy that helped ignite the conflict ultimately failed in its larger objective. The attempt to permanently estrange India and China did not lock India into a dependent alliance, nor did it dismantle China’s control over Tibet. Instead, it produced a war that hardened borders, poisoned relations, and left behind a legacy of suspicion without delivering decisive strategic gains.
Polls Open In War-Torn Myanmar, First Since 2021 Coup
Overshadowed by civil war and doubts about the credibility of the polls, voters in Myanmar were casting their ballots in a general election starting on Sunday, the first since a military coup toppled the last civilian government in 2021.
The junta that has since ruled Myanmar says the vote is a chance for a fresh start politically and economically for the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.
But the election has been derided by critics – including the United Nations, some Western countries and human rights groups – as an exercise that is not free, fair or credible, with
anti-junta political parties not competing.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, deposed by the military months after her National League for Democracy won the last general election by a landslide in 2020, remains in detention, and the political party she led to power has been dissolved.
Soon after polls opened at 6 a.m. (2330 GMT), voters began trickling into some polling booths in the country’s largest cities of Yangon and Mandalay, according to a witness
and local media.
Dressed in civilian clothes, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing voted in the heavily guarded capital city of Naypyitaw, then held up an ink-soaked little finger, smiling widely, photographs published by the pro-military Popular News Journal showed.
Voters must dip a finger into indelible ink after casting a ballot to ensure they don’t vote more than once.
Asked by reporters if he would like to become the country’s president, an office that analysts say he has ambitions for, the general said he wasn’t the leader of any political party.
“When the parliament convenes, there is a process for electing the president,” he said.
Mass protests followed the ouster of Suu Kyi’s party, only to be violently suppressed by the military. Many protesters then took up arms against the junta in what became a nationwide rebellion.
In this election, the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party, led by retired generals and fielding one-fifth of all candidates against severely diminished
competition, is set to return to power, said Lalita Hanwong, a lecturer and Myanmar expert at Thailand’s Kasetsart University.
“The junta’s election is designed to prolong the military’s power of slavery over people,” she said. “And USDP and other allied parties with the military will join forces to form the
next government.”
Following the initial phase on Sunday, two rounds of voting will be held on January 11 and January 25, covering 265 of Myanmar’s 330 townships, although the junta does not have
complete control of all those areas as it fights in the war that has consumed the country since the coup.
Dates for counting votes and announcing election results have not been declared.
With fighting still raging in parts of the country, the elections are being held in an environment of violence and repression, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said last week.
There has been none of the energy and excitement of previous election campaigns, residents of Myanmar’s largest cities said, although they did not report any coercion by the military administration to push people to vote.
The PLA’s New Cold Start Doctrine ‘Has An India Message’
“China’s cold start is very similar to the Indian cold start or a cold start by any other armed forces in the world, which means the ability to conduct rapid, high intensity offensive operations before an adversary can mobilize or intervene.
“So you have to be fast, you have to be rapid and you have to get a quick, easy victory, at least in the initial stage,” says Suyash Desai, China scholar specialising on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Desai was a guest on The Gist, analysing the implications of the PLA’s cold start doctrine, which means mobilising in 30 minutes. That means from the time the order to mobilise is issued to the time when troops are ready on station, it takes half an hour.
The Chinese military has been taken up with the idea of cold start for some years now. Desai recalls reading Mandarin language publications including those related to the PLA, that refer to the need for getting into action rapidly.
Although they style it as “defensive operation”, Desai argues that it is anything but defensive. This is something the PLA’s top leadership has been pushing hard for and the political brass has also got involved.
“But for various reasons including corruption, demand-supply mismatch between the personnel they want for the tools they are acquiring, those goals couldn’t be achieved,” Desai said. “But they worked on different exercises and be it east or west, north beach or South China Sea, every theater command is going to benefit from cold start.”
He pointed to another significant development. Normally, doctrines of this kind are first tested in the Eastern Theatre Command responsible for Taiwan, and the Southern Theatre Command that oversees the South China Sea.
But in this case, the testing ground was Tibet, meaning the front against India. This goes against the 1993 directive where Taiwan was referred to as the first primary strategic direction and India as the secondary strategic direction.
But since 2020, the Xinjiang and Tibet fronts against India have received some of the best and latest military hardware. It suggests that from secondary strategic direction, India is now got an upgrade where it is virtually on par with the Taiwan front.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Suyash Desai, China scholar specialising on the People’s Liberation Army.
Trump’s Anti-India, Pro-Pakistan Stance Part Of Longtime U.S. Policy
President Donald Trump’s stand in supporting Pakistan and his administration’s hostility towards India, after Operation Sindoor, may have come as a surprise to many casual observers but Washington’s policies in the sub-continent have always been designed to contain India, historical documents show.
While this report, based on a recently published, peer-reviewed paper holds the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) responsible for inciting the 1962 war between India and China, many other actions during pre- and post-1971 also demonstrate constant efforts by the US to undermine India.
When Kao Flagged U.S. Position
An official correspondence between RN Kao, the founder of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and then Indian Army Chief Gen (later Field Marshal) Sam Manekshaw in June 1972, reveals how the U.S. was determined to help a defeated Pakistan to maintain an ‘equilibrium’ in Asia. The top secret note from Kao to Manekshaw gives a detailed assessment of the US intentions. Kao’s note was in response to a missive shared by Gen Manekshaw based on information sent by India’s Military Attache in Washington.
As Kao writes: “U.S.A. wants a strong Pakistan as a counterbalance against India to the extent possible and as a source of stability, particularly in the Persian Gulf area.” The American policy (Richard Nixon was the President) was based on the new reality in the sub-continent in 1972. “It is the official US position that even before the December 1971 war, the military balance shifted decisively toward India between 1966 and 1971…they concede that India has emerged from this crisis as the dominant power in South Asia.”
Distinct Pakistan Tilt Of U.S.
In this context, Kao writes to Manekshaw: “Both China and the U.S.A. support Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir. Both are interested in keeping the issue alive as a means of pressure on India and as a bone of contention between India and Pakistan which ensures that the two countries remain at loggerheads.”
The final paragraph of the note, available in the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML) in New Delhi, could have been written in 2025. It reads: “This is not to say that either the U.S.A. or China is reconciled to India’s success… this period would be full of dangers to us. The U.S.A. would now seek to create a new balance in the region.
The main lines of this policy insofar as these can be discerned are as follows: a) military and economic aid to Pakistan with a view to restoring political and economic stability and rebuilding Pakistan as a strong military power; b) large-scale economic aid to Bangladesh to reduce Indian and Soviet influence; c) efforts to strengthen US influence in the smaller countries—Nepal, Bhutan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bangladesh and Pakistan—as an antidote to India; d) efforts to increase separatist moves in India and to encourage dissatisfied minorities with a view to weakening India and reduce Soviet influence and e) increased U.S. naval presence to maintain a balance of military power.”
CIA’s Bngladesh Mission
In October 1972, PN Banerjee, then Joint Director of R&AW based in Calcutta (and one of the closest friends of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), in a note to Kao, confirmed the prevailing suspicion about the CIA. The top secret note read, in parts: “Sheikh Mujibur Rahman repeatedly mentioned about the growing CIA activities in Bangladesh. He said that he had already alerted his Special Branch as well as the Director of External Intelligence Mr Monen Khan alias Mihir, who keeps discreet vigilance on CIA operators in Bangladesh and reports to him from time to time. He also solicited our assistance in curbing CIA activities in Bangladesh.”
The CIA was not only infiltrating and financing anti-Mujib parties but were also ‘assiduously cultivating’ some of the high officials of the Bangladesh govt, Banerjee’s note added. The R&AW’s point person in Bangladesh, quoted the head of Bangladeshi External Intelligence, DIG Khan alias Mihir saying among the CIA contacts were Ruhul Kuddus, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Mujib, Taslimuddin Ahmed, Home Secretary, Ibrahim, Director General, Security, Nurul Islam and Rahman Shobhan of the Planning Commission. Clearly, the Americans had managed to reach the inner circle of Shiekh Mujib within a year of the liberation of Bangladesh, during which the U.S. was supporting the Pakistan army openly.
The current anti-India sentiment currently sweeping among hotheads and radicals in Bangladesh should therefore not surprise anyone going by what happened even half a century ago. History is repeating itself in India’s neighbourhood, maybe in a more virulent form, thanks to the continuing hostility of the Americans.
How The CIA Provoked The 1962 Sino-India War
The 1962 India–China war was sparked not by a sudden border dispute but by Cold War covert operations, as sustained CIA efforts to destabilise Tibet reshaped Beijing’s threat perceptions and dragged India—often unknowingly—into the resulting confrontation.
Recently declassified US government documents show that the Central Intelligence Agency ran a sustained covert war in Tibet in the late 1950s and pursued it despite clear awareness that it could provoke China and destabilise India–China relations.
This reconstruction draws on recently declassified US State Department records, including Foreign Relations of the United States volumes released decades after the war, as well as declassified intelligence material relating to covert operations in Tibet. These documents have been synthesised and analysed in investigative reporting by Kit Klarenberg and in recent peer-reviewed scholarship by D. Lakshmana Kumar, which reassesses the origins of the 1962 conflict using Indian, American, and Chinese archival sources.
For decades, the origins of the 1962 war were explained narrowly, framed either as a cartographic quarrel or as a failure of Indian military preparedness. Tibet, when mentioned at all, appeared as a peripheral complication. The documentary record now tells a different story. Tibet was not incidental to the conflict; it was the arena in which the strategic logic of the Cold War first collided with the fragile politics of post-colonial Asia.
By the mid-1950s, Washington had concluded that direct confrontation with the People’s Republic of China was neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, US planners sought indirect pressure points along China’s vast periphery. Tibet, recently brought under Beijing’s control and geographically isolated, emerged as a prime candidate. Declassified US planning documents and later official acknowledgements make clear that American policymakers did not believe Tibet could be liberated. Its value lay in distraction, attrition, and propaganda.
Beginning in 1957, Tibetan fighters were secretly removed from the region, trained abroad in guerrilla warfare, communications, and sabotage, and then parachuted back into Tibet. Arms and supplies followed through covert air drops. These operations expanded significantly in 1958 and 1959, precisely when China was already under acute internal strain from the failures of the Great Leap Forward and growing unrest in Tibet.
From the American perspective, success was measured not by battlefield outcomes but by pressure exerted. Later admissions by US officials acknowledged that even a failed insurgency served strategic purposes if it forced Beijing to divert troops, harden internal controls, and expose itself internationally. Tibet, in this calculus, was not a people or a place but an instrument.
For China, however, Tibet was existential. Chinese leaders had long believed that unrest in border regions invited imperial intervention, a lesson drawn from their own modern history. As resistance intensified and its sophistication became evident, Beijing concluded that it could not be indigenous. Formal Chinese protests from the period accused “imperialist forces” of orchestrating subversion against Chinese sovereignty.
India entered this picture not by design, but by geography and circumstance. Tibetan refugees crossed into India. Political activity centred in places like Kalimpong. Communications passed through Indian territory. While New Delhi neither authorised nor controlled the covert war in Tibet, Chinese leaders increasingly viewed India as a permissive conduit for hostile activity.
Secrecy proved decisive. The CIA’s Tibetan programme was covert not only from the public but also from much of the Indian political leadership. India had no operational oversight of actions unfolding in its immediate neighbourhood. Yet from Beijing’s perspective, distinctions between American action and Indian responsibility blurred. Geography collapsed nuance, and suspicion filled the gaps.
The Tibetan uprising of March 1959 and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India marked a turning point. For India, granting asylum was a humanitarian act consistent with its values. For China, it confirmed the belief that India had abandoned neutrality. Chinese internal discussions and public messaging from this period increasingly framed Tibet—not the boundary line—as the central grievance shaping Sino-Indian relations.
State Department and policy documents show that American officials were aware that covert action in Tibet could push China toward confrontation with India. Yet the programme continued. In Cold War logic, a widening rift between China and a major non-aligned Asian state was not an unintended consequence; it was strategically useful.
By the end of the 1950s, the effects were cumulative. China hardened its posture along the frontier. Diplomatic talks stalled. Chinese patrols moved forward in disputed areas. India, interpreting these moves as territorial aggression, responded with forward deployments of its own. Each step reinforced the other side’s worst assumptions, all against the unresolved backdrop of Tibet.
The crucial point is that the 1962 war did not erupt suddenly. It emerged from years of escalating mistrust rooted in covert action, misperception, and Cold War strategy. Chinese leaders repeatedly linked the need to “teach India a lesson” to what they saw as Indian interference in Tibet. At the same time, continued American covert activity ensured that Chinese anxieties about encirclement never receded.
India found itself trapped by forces it did not control. Its policy of non-alignment limited its leverage over the superpowers. Its humanitarian actions were reinterpreted as hostility. And its lack of visibility into covert American operations meant it bore the consequences of decisions taken elsewhere.
By the time Chinese forces crossed the Himalayas in October 1962, the war had already been prepared—by secret training camps, arms drops, intelligence assessments, and Cold War strategies that treated Tibet not as a society, but as a lever.
As Donald Trump later complained, India never truly entered Washington’s camp; the vast covert effort once invested in driving a lasting rupture between India and China ultimately dissolved against geopolitical reality, leaving behind little more than strategic wreckage and a war whose costs were borne by others.