India's policies towards China have been too passive and deferential. Perhaps it is a legacy of 1962. China on the other hand has been aggressively encircling India via its proxies. The support to TSP and the proliferation of the *BUM* clearly shines out but is just one piece of the puzzle. There needs to be a rapid overhaul of Indian thinking towards China.
In spite of the bluster and big talk, China has its internal schisms and trouble spots. However India does little to exploit those schisms. Though a lot is being written about how the US is begging China, what is not being talked about much is how the collapse in exports to the US is wreaking havoc in Chinese factories also. The unprecedented government stimulus is helping cushion the fall but that can last for so long. The Uighur-Han battles in Southern China were probably a result of the
Uighir stealing our jobs fear.
On the external front, whether it is Taiwan, Vietnam or Japan, China's neighbors are wary of her rise and her empire building. Unlike the Europeans who exploited Asia on the economic front, China's vision involves demographic conquest also. Whether it is Tibet or the Xianjing, the ultimate goal is to destroy the local culture and rebuild the demographics by transplanting ethnic Chinese.
India needs a cohesive policy to use these schisms to limit the sphere of influence of the Chinese.
For reasons I fail to understand, India has not made any noise about Tibet. Tibet has historical cultural, linguistic, and religious links to India. Whether it is the Mansarovar or the Buddhist monks, Tibet has much stronger cultural ties to India. The Tibetan alphabet is almost the same as Devenagri Ka,Kha,Ga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script They have nothing in common with the East Asian Pictographic scripts. Chinese occupation of Tibet is justified only by its use of brute force.
The mighty Himalayas have saved the Indic civilization from the Chinese onslaught, but Tibet should be a reminder of what the Chinese are willing to do. India needs to assert her right to dispute Chinese rule over Tibet and go beyond the Dalai Lama.
Sheltering the Dalai Lama has provided the hard-liners in China with the pretext to encircle India; India in return has not been able to do any damage to China using the Dalai Lama.
GOI needs to learn from Mao, and realize that the power flows from the barrel of the gun. The Dalai Lama is getting old and the next generation of Tibetans are unlikely to follow his style of passive protest. It is likely that some other foreign power will co-opt the younger Tibetan, who are willing to fight the PLA, and India will lose any leverage it has with the Tibetan resistance movement. But India will still be held responsible in the eyes of the Chinese.
Over the next two decades, China will become much older and the social burden of supporting an aging population will increase. India on the other hand will have a lot more younger productive people. It is perhaps time for India to start think about how to leverage this advantage.
The stated or unstated goal of India should be to push toward the creation of Tibet as a demilitarized buffer zone between the two great powers. That will end all Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh also. Instead of playing defense, India should start playing offense when it comes to China.
The first step should of course be to increase defense spending as a percentage of GDP to be at par with what China spends. In a multi-polar world where one great power can not be counted to maintain peace and order, it is imperative that second level powers be strong enough to withstand each other.
If the gap becomes too large, China's imperealistic tendencies will become even stronger. Their reaction to the IAF strengthening its defenses in the East is an indication of how they perceive themselves to be belonging to a different league. The PLA has not fought a war in a generation now, so it is hard to measure their competency. However, their fundamental attitudes are obvious. The only thing they respect is power, and is high time India starts building its muscle.