Pak Sahafat – The Financial Times newspaper wrote in a report with an overview of the capabilities of the Indian and Chinese armies: For New Delhi, the short-term goal is to avoid a confrontation with the powerful northeast neighbor, which reveals the gap between the capabilities of China and India.
According to Pak Sahafat News Agency’s report, the Financial Times in a report compared the Indian and Chinese armies as the two nuclear powers of the world and considered whether India can survive against China by building a powerful army in any possible military confrontation?
This report states:
By the spring of 2020, China and India had taken elaborate precautions to prevent a resurgence of tensions along their shared northern border, where they had been at war for nearly six decades. Soldiers along this border, called the Line of Actual Control, usually patrol unarmed, sometimes leaving cigarette butts or other vernacular trash in the buffer zone to signal to the other side that they have been there.
When patrols of the Indian Armed Forces and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army clashed physically, they displayed banners warning the other side that they had trespassed on the other’s national territory and ordering them to retreat.
But in the months of April and May 2020, Chinese forces broke the unstable peace situation by cutting off some of the regular Indian patrol routes in eastern Ladakh. The unarmed soldiers attacked each other with machetes and stones and by the end of the clashes, 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers were killed.
Analysts say that the possibility of a future conflict between the world’s two most populous countries cannot be denied.
The 2020 Galvan Valley incident served as a wake-up call to Indian military and civilian institutions about the risk of a wider confrontation with China and its armed forces in the future.
After the Galwan clashes, India moved six army divisions from its northern front along the border with its traditional enemy Pakistan to northern Ladakh.
Bipin Rawat, India’s then chief of army staff, last year described China as India’s biggest security threat, saying the Chinese were building villages across the Line of Actual Control, possibly to house their own civilians or to deploy the army in the future.
Following Galvan, China was seen as a clear and present challenge by the Indian public and policymakers after decades, says Dhruva Jaishenkar, executive director of the Observer Research Foundation of America, a think tank. There was a broader understanding that China’s military might could not be managed by diplomatic agreements alone, and that it required India to take its own military and economic steps.
According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), India’s defense spending has increased by 50 percent over a decade from $49.6 billion in the last two years to $76.6 billion last year.
Read more:
China expresses serious concerns over India banning Chinese apps
New Delhi’s priorities for modernizing the military have included ensuring a sustainable military industrial capacity, part of a broader “Make in India” campaign aimed at creating domestic production of industrial needs.
India has opened its market to other countries, including France and the Israeli regime, in long-term contracts, and just a few months after the Galvan incident, India signed a new defense contract with the United States.
India, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with “indigenization” efforts to strengthen its domestic manufacturing capacity.
India’s attempt to build an indigenous military industry dates back decades to its early years of independence, when India began using foreign technology to develop domestic weapons, including a fighter jet and a self-loading rifle, but only state-owned companies were allowed to do so. They entered the defense business and indigenization stopped and India remained one of the world’s largest military importers.
The need to accelerate localization for India was intensified by the Galvan conflicts in 2020. To boost its defense production, India in August 2020 began banning the import of hundreds of pieces of military hardware, which now include everything from springs to surveillance equipment and patrol boats. Some of these bans have been implemented almost immediately, while others will be implemented until 2032.
Despite the conflicts on Pakistan’s border, China is a much stronger potential adversary for India, which the Indians admit spends heavily on their military. Analysts say the calculations are complicated because only by delivering faster economic growth than China, which India has achieved, can India afford to spend more on defense.
Defense analyst Angad Singh says: Both in the military and civilian sectors in India, everyone is looking at Ukraine. They see the cost of war and realize that we cannot afford it.
Manoj Joshi, a senior fellow at the ORF Research Foundation, said: “Modi does not want to engage in conflict with Xi, and if there is one opponent who can upset his government and undermine his credibility, it is the Chinese, they are very careful.”
However, some analysts believe that new clashes with China are likely, with the risk greatest in the farthest northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Indian forces are more dispersed there and its infrastructure is less developed, and China considers it all part of Tibet and claims it as southern Tibet.
The threat is not limited to borders. Satellite images from the Beijing-controlled port of Djibouti, about 2,000 nautical miles from Mumbai, show Chinese naval ships docked there, suggesting that China could also project its power in the Indian Ocean in the future.
India’s navy is much smaller than China’s and its assets need reinvestment, even India’s first aircraft carrier, the ex-Soviet-built Vikram Aditya, is undergoing repairs.
The Modi government has commissioned another carrier, the Vikrant, but it is not yet ready to land naval jets, with pilots currently conducting test flights from a base in Goa.
India hopes that exchanges with its neighbor will not become more aggressive in the coming months as analysts say the imbalance in military power between the two has not changed.