China Confronts India in Ladakh while Pakistan still Fails Kashmiris

News:

China says it has reached a “positive consensus” with India over resolving tensions at the border between the two countries, where troops have faced off in recent weeks.

A “positive consensus” on resolving the latest border issue was achieved following “effective communication” through diplomatic and military channels, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters on Wednesday.

“Currently both sides are taking appropriate actions to ease the border situation based on this consensus,” she said, without giving further details.

On Sunday, New Delhi said the two countries had agreed to “peacefully resolve” the border flare-up after a high-level meeting between army commanders on Saturday.

Tensions flare on a fairly regular basis between the two regional powers over their 3,500-kilometre (2,200-mile) frontier, which has never been properly demarcated.

Thousands of troops from the two nuclear-armed neighbours have been involved in the latest face-off since May in India’s Ladakh region, bordering Tibet – before signs in recent days that a resolution was in sight. [AlJazeera]

Comment:

The immediate provocation for the Chinese border intrusion has been the conversion on 31 October 2019 of the State of Jammu and Kashmir into a Union Territory and so ruled by Delhi and the amputation from it of Ladakh, created as a separate Union Territory. Furthermore, while Jammu and Kashmir continues to have some semblance of local politics through the continuation of its legislative assembly, Ladakh has not been allowed to have one and so will function much more directly under central government control. Though the government talks of the opportunity for boosting ‘tourism’ in Ladakh, it is quite obvious to the Chinese that the purpose of separating Ladakh was for India to ramp up the development of military infrastructure in this highly strategic forward area between the Chinese Line of Actual Control to the east and the Pakistani Line of Control to the west, while to the north Ladakh borders on the historic Karakoram Pass, on what was traditionally the shortest route between India and China.

Since the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014, India has been following a deliberate and calculated policy of intensifying its confrontation with China, a highly risky policy that India gains nothing from and which can therefore only be understood to be imposed upon the Indian BJP government by America. It is America that has, at least since Obama’s 2011 pivot to Asia, made containing China its highest priority. In response, China has spent most of the rest of the decade strengthening itself internally through Xi Jinping’s forceful leadership that has reconsolidated and recentralised political, military, commercial and cultural authority in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. And after continual American provocations, China is beginning to exhibit externally the fruits of its newfound strength across a broad range of conflict points from the South China Sea to the trade war with America, and from Hong Kong to its several thousand kilometre long border with India.

The question is why Pakistan is silent in all this. While China and India manoeuvre against each other to fortify their geography, Pakistan is guilty not only of neglecting geography but of abandoning the Muslims of Kashmir who have remained under forced Indian occupation for more than 70 years.

The only path for the Muslim Ummah to retake control of its affairs is to eject the agent ruling class that takes its instructions from the West and instead pledge their loyalty to sincere, capable, indigenous leadership that will re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw), liberate the occupied territories, reunify Muslim lands, implement again the Islamic Sharia and carry the light of Islam to the entire world.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah