How to fight China without firing a bullet

One episode in the Mahabharata is relevant today when retired-generals-turned-TV-warriors bristle with righteous anger at China’s perfidy and urge redemption of national honour at any cost.The Kauravas built a house of lac for the Pandavas to live in while on an extended excursion to a forest region.The idea was that the Pandavas would perish in an incendiary accident. Vidura, wise man and uncle to both the Pandavas and the Kauravas, had a tunnel secretly built underneath the house and warned the Pandavas of the danger they were in, before they left.Epic Proportions The Pandavas lived in the house of lac, without letting on they knew of its fiery potential, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the architect who built the house and stayed on to supervise their stay. One night, a Nishada (tribal hunters) family, a woman and her five sons, came to the house seeking alms. They were dined and wined, and they slept off in the house itself. The Pandavas set fire to the house, escaped through the tunnel and went into hiding, to emerge only to take part in King Drupada’s archery challenge to win his daughter’s hand.The Nishada family, which burned to death and convinced Duryodhana that the Pandavas were, indeed, cinder and deserved a few tears of cousinly sorrow shed in public rather than an official search, is a powerful symbol of what the elite think of the poor in their pursuit of power and glory.The vast majority of Indians, who subsist below the poverty line or balance themselves precariously on that line or in the rarefied space immediately above it, cannot afford the war TV belligerents would thrust upon them.War should be the last option. But isn’t national honour important? Of course, it is. There are more ways to redeem national honour than by going to war. Vietnam gave China a bloody nose in 1979. China has not gone to war with Vietnam since then, although it has grown powerful enough to crush Vietnam without even noticing it. No one thinks China is inferior to Vietnam on any count that matters.The right way to prevail over China is to build real strength: political, economic, military, technological and diplomatic. Our immediate response must not jeopardise the process of building such strength. Multilateral and bilateral diplomacy must be deployed to create the space India needs to hold its peace with dignity.Dignity and honour roll glibly off the tongues of the elite, as they compare themselves with the elites of other nations. What is national dignity for the village woman who is raped and has no recourse other than to commit suicide, as the police reject her complaint and the rapists threaten her family?What is dignity for dalits who are beaten up and even lynched because their assertion of their humanity affronts the dignity of those who wield greater social power? What is India’s national dignity when lynch mobs beat up and kill Muslims asking them to chant Jai Shri Ram? What is India’s national dignity when millions of the working poor are forced to set out on foot for their distant, native villages, in the wake of an unplanned lockdown that closed the door on their jobs, income and even access to food?What is dignity for those who are turned away by hospital after hospital while they search for a bed for treatment of Covid-19 and die during their desperate hunt? What is India’s national honour as chief ministers vie to classify deaths as due to heart disease, pneumonia and kidney failure, and to rein in the number of Covid tests, so as to minimise their own tally of death and disease?Status Update: Not AvailableSure, man does not live by bread alone. People need more than material sustenance. They belong to groups, cheer teams. But all identities are not of their choosing, some are ascribed to them, thrust upon them by the accident of birth. Social norms and culture dictate they should accept their status and learn to find glory in the glory of their social superiors.The Manusmriti described the brahmin as the lord of all creation and deemed it everyone’s duty to serve him. And doing one’s duty was, of course, Dharma. Presenting servitude as redemptive glory is accomplished in more subtle ways now. The officers who died in the Kargil war have roads named after them and find mention in textbooks. The families of the 500 or so ordinary soldiers who died alongside, their children who grow up without a father, in relative poverty, can find their private glory in being associated with those heroes.India’s tryst with honour lies in ending poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity, in ending sectarian politics and creating broad-based growth that enriches the lives of all Indians. All international engagement must be tailored to facilitate this goal: alignment, non-alignment, buying arms, selling armaments, hugging foreign leaders, wooing Indians abroad. Otherwise, they mean little other than leader aggrandisement.The 1971 war disabled Pakistan, eroding its ability to hinder India’s progress. But at a huge economic cost: India’s per-capita income stagnated in the 1970s, social unrest erupted, the Emergency followed. India cannot afford a repeat performance now, to no tangible gain.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2YZqOoM
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