SPEAKING
FREELY Indian press buries truth at the
border By Debasish Roy
Chowdhury
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
First, the bad news
: Indian Army preparing for limited conflict
with China: US intel chief; China inching closer
in Arunachal; China creeping up in Ladakh; Chinese
intrusion in Leh; Jitters over Beijing border
build-up; India beefs up China front with UAVs,
copters; Govt plans to recruit 90K soldiers for
China border; China threat: Army inducts new
regiment of BrahMos; 114 light combat choppers to
thwart any Chinese mischief.
Now, the
good news : India is not actually going to war with
China. Contrary to what
these blaring headlines in Indian newspapers
suggest, mostly tucked away in inside pages and
fewer in number are the less incendiary ones, such
as: India, China ink border peace pact; China
not likely to attack, PM tells Parliament; Border
with China most peaceful: Govt; India-China
defence ties on fast track.
The shame
of a lost border war left a long tradition of
anti-Chinese slant in Indian newspapers, to the
point where it doesn’t even seem like an
aberration. But for some years now, the tone of a
large section of the media has turned decidedly
strident, a condition the country’s leading
Outlook magazine once diagnosed as "Sinositis".
Where once the China reportage gave the impression
that for some in the media the war never quite
ended, now one gets the sense that the infected
are, in fact, itching for another round. Brace
yourself for more malignant stuff this year, which
marks the 50th anniversary of the war.
Many of the China-bashing stories doing
the rounds in Indian papers are a mixture of
reflexive phobia, envy, anxiety and great-game
bluster, with headlines such as Wary of China
moves, India, US & Japan plan talks; As China
looms, US tells India to lead Asia; etc. Some
are products of the occasional public spats on
issues such as territorial rights, and are
appropriately combative (Manmohan to Wen: Back
off on South China Sea). And, when they are
not openly hawkish and baying for blood (With
China in mind, India tests new-generation Agni
missile with high 'kill efficiency', screams a
November headline), they are passive aggressive at
the minimum, often betraying a degree of
inferiority complex. The subheading to another
November story headlined East Asia meet to have
China tilt read INDIA STAND: Can't check them,
will wait and watch. And that's not even an
editorial!
Then there are the Chinese
"incursions" stories - the most potent, and the
fountainhead, of all Sinoscare media motifs in
India. These stories, liberally peppered with
alarmist words like "aggression", "transgression",
"encroachment", and the like, follow a familiar
pattern. "Sources", mostly unnamed, tell a paper
or a TV channel how Chinese forces have been
intruding into Indian territory; a
comparison with similar intrusions in
previous years establish how the Chinese
menace is rising; followed by accounts of
Chinese military build-up.
The
story gathers pace, with more papers and channels
joining in, before politicians demand to know - as
they did during the last session of the parliament
- what the government is doing about it. At this
point, top army or government officials step in to
restore order by way of an all-is-well statement
on the border situation. In the latest
instance, it took Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,
no less, to assure agitated parliamentarians that
China would not attack India. Phew!
The
typical story that sets in motion this periodic
cycle of rage and reason will have Chinese
intrusion or something to that effect in the
headline and will start off detailing how and when
aggressive Chinese soldiers muscled into
Indian territory in a certain border area. But
lower down, by which time the reader is most
likely to have turned the page after having been
suitably alarmed at the increasing
assertiveness of the Chinese, there may be -
if at all - a throwaway line explaining that the
disputed area is not clearly demarcated.
Now, that's really the crux of it. India
and China do not actually have a border. What they
have is a notional, undemarcated LAC (Line of
Actual Control) as opposed to one that is agreed
and marked out on land. As the exact alignments of
the LAC are not mutually agreed, Indian and
Chinese forces have their own ideas on where it
lies and are constantly trying to establish its
limits - as each side sees it.
Hence the
interpretation of what substitutes for border is
subject to perceptual differences - a boring,
headline-killer of a nuance that the Indian
government keeps repeating but nobody seems
particularly interested. As Defense Minister A K
Antony puts it, "Differing perceptions of the
unresolved LAC" means "sometimes our people go
there, sometimes their people come here, but
basically there is no change ... Sometimes
incursions take place when they go to areas which
they think is with them and sometimes we also do
that".
It's often in the course of such
comings and goings that 'incursions' occur, with
the two sides yet to determine on which side of
the LAC these particular problem areas lie. They
will presumably do that right after they agree on
where exactly the LAC itself lies. But while
Indian and Chinese interlocutors have been trying
to do that for 30 years now, in what may the
world's longest ever border talks, scare-mongering
Indian journos have long figured it all out. For
them, there is not an iota of doubt on where that
line is, which side is China's and which India's.
As such, the faintest whiff of the comings
will have the media all over the story. Trigger as
they do a primal fear in a country repeatedly
invaded throughout its history, comings make for
great copy. Few of these stories bother to
explain, or even mention, the muddled status of
the boundary that lends itself to
misinterpretation, and trouble. The goings, on the
other hand - on the rare occasions that they get
reported - are downplayed. Which is why, if you
have followed Indian papers of late, you will have
read that an Indian chopper strayed into
Pakistani territory, which happened about the same
time that Chinese troops violated Indian
airspace.
What the "incursion" stories
essentially do, is give the impression of the
existence - and sanctity - of a line of separation
that does not really exist, and feed collective
outrage with accounts of its alleged violation.
What these stories also end up doing is blow up
localized border scuffles into national panic fits
that raise political temperature and complicate
the civil-military equation on both sides, making
the task of achieving a well-defined border that
much harder.
India and China inherited an
extremely tangled border that has far too many
gray areas of ownership. To pretend otherwise with
a stance of stubborn cartographical certitude is
to be in a state of denial and constant war, as
much of India's media find themselves in these
days. Having learnt from their past mistakes, both
governments are doing a commendable job avoiding
that trap and have continued to talk despite their
deep disagreements that threaten to derail
dialogue every so often, and despite the best
efforts of the warmongers.
The two sides
have put in place elaborate mechanisms to sort out
the differences in the event of conflicting
perceptions on the border alignment and prevent
such altercations from snowballing. This is why
not a single shot has been fired across the LAC
since New Delhi and Beijing signed the 1993
Confidence Building Measures on the border.
Even in eyeball-to-eyeball situations,
when the paths of the two armies meet as they
probe the limits of their perceived boundary,
soldiers - away from home, cold, armed, face to
face with the enemy and on the edge in a hostile
terrain - are trained to hold their fire and allow
reason over passion. Could journalists,
negotiating the comparatively milder stresses of
deadline and caffeine, ever learn to do the same?
Debasish Roy Chowdhury is
an Indian
journalist currently based in Hong Kong.
(Copyright 2012 Debasish Roy
Chowdhury.)
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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