The realms of satellite imagery always take you behind in the time machine to understand what happened yesterday. While surfing on Google Earth, the author chanced upon some Chinese ships in Colombo. There were two ships: one was Type 905 auxiliary oil replenishment ship and the other was Type 53H3 frigate. The missing pennant number on stern of the frigate and retractable hangar on the stern of the oiler were convincing giveaways.
Increasingly, funding is coming from individuals in Middle East, many of whom are connected to North Korean cash supply chains through individuals linked to GHQ Rawalpindi.
Standard portrayal of the North East has been that it is India’s periphery. Indeed, geography and to an extent socio-cultural realities have consigned it to the fringe of not only India’s nation-building enterprise, but also to the backwaters of the country’s collective consciousness. But the reality is that the region is not India’s periphery.
An important aspect that New Delhi must bear in mind when it enters into a ceasefire agreement with insurgent groups is that unresolved ceasefires over long durations could witness the emergence of an “over ground movement” with an anti-India agenda.
National security in the context of the North East cannot confine itself to only the myriad insurgencies that dot its variegated landscape. It must take into account the strategic encirclement that the region is heir to. Surrounded by China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal (the erstwhile Himalayan kingdom is placed a little afield, near the Siliguri corridor). 88 percent of the North East’s boundaries are international, with only 12 percent connecting it to mainland India. The borders in the North East must, therefore, lend itself to robust management.
Reticent corners of the universe seldom come to light, unobtrusively concealing themselves from gaze and assay. The uncharted neuronal caverns of the brain of Homo sapiens, heir to countless stealth space, are among such quarters. The human brain is, after all, the most sophisticated objet d’art that creation has shaped. Nature ascertains that the behavioural patterns fractionate along genetic boundaries. Nurture—especially if it suits the sapient architecture that nature has fashioned—encourages the innateness.
It is not immediately known whether Carl von Clausewitz (Born: 1780), the Prussian General and author of the redoubtable treatise On War was influenced by Sun Tzu, the 544 BC Chinese general and philosopher, but a close reading of both their works would seem to entail that despite the apparent differences in their philosophies pertaining to warfare, there exists certain inherent convergences.
The North East of India—heir to a thousand mutinies—has—of late—been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
