Balance of Power

China is comfortably settled down with its new found position of authority in Asia, its right none there to dispute. Here and there, India has been trying its subtle tactics but its feeble efforts are visible to the Chinese even without having made any effort.

In total desperation in India’s urge to exert its influence, its right foot seems to be stumbling upon its own left foot. Notable in its naivety, India imposed trade embargo upon Nepal for which India could not have chosen a worse time. Nepal is land-locked, entirely India-locked and has no option but to succumb to India’s pressure and do its bidding.

Not this time. China has been sending feelers if it could connect Nepal within its much publicized railway network and Nepal naturally accepted the offer. Within days, when India’s blockade was still very much in place, the Chinese engineers doubled up their efforts and the high altitude rail and road is progressing at breakneck speed across the Himalayas, for the first time in history of mankind.

Chinese have offered Nepal multifarious technical, financial and human services in high speed trains and ropeways; road and bridge construction and tunnel-boring machines and equipment, hydro-electricity and animal husbandry with twenty thousands of dairy animals; training of railway engineers, civil engineers and of course Chinese language.

In hush hush language, the Chinese are providing the Nepalese Army with modern sophisticated weapons including stinger type missiles.

There is more to it. Indians have the Dalai Lama as a weapon to irritate the Chinese and now the Chinese have found a counter point to challenge the Indians; and the story goes like this:

During the heydays of the Empire, the Brits had brow beaten the Nepalese and taken away certain strategic pieces of lands from Nepal and when the Brits were granting Independence to Hindustan (Bharat) and Pakistan in 1947, it was incumbent upon the Brits that they should have returned those lands back to Nepal. They did not and now the Chinese are preparing grounds to see if they could help Nepal regain those lands.

This is only a summary of the happenings in South Asia and I am writing this to ask the Government of USA if they need to get themselves involved. Why not?

John Foster Dulles had rightly said, “He who controls Middle East, shall control the world”. None controls the Middle East and none controls the world. Don’t let that happen in South Asia but remember USA can meet China in Nepal.

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