Comprehensive National Power

India needs a strategic effort to understand that it is no longer competing with China, but seeking to cope with an increasing asymmetry of power

 It is no secret that there’s a delay in India’s current cycle of military modernisation. Ask the services and they will vaguely claim that the cycle will be completed by 2022 or maybe 2027. The effort is to induct the contemporary range of armoured vehicles, artillery, fighter jets, submarines, frigates and so on. Given the decades taken to achieve this, these systems will almost immediately become obsolete and another delayed cycle will begin.
As long as an indigent Pakistan was the principal adversary, this caused no big worry. But we now inc­reasingly confront a risen China, whose plans work on schedule, and whose modernisation is relen­tlessly moving from copying western design and concepts towards leapfrogging to become technology leaders.





 In recent years, China has systematically built up its military, and also undertaken a deep reorganisation of its structure. This is aimed at creating a force that, as Xi Jinping is never tired of repeating, is loyal to the Communist Party of China and capable of fighting and winning wars. The reorganisation has led to an integrated military divided into geographical theatre commands mimicking in many ways the organisation of its principal adversary: the United States.

The modernisation is top to bottom—it begins with the nuclear forces, the bedrock of Beijing’s status as a world power, and goes right down to the maritime militias that are used to swamp fishing grounds in the South China Sea. The Chinese are simultaneously aiming to deny the US access to its mainland through the so-called A2/AD (anti-access area denial) syst­ems, and at the same time organising their own forces for greater regional and even extra-regional reach.
So, while China’s navy moves from offshore defence to regional capability, its air force is creating an integrated aerospace system for offensive and defensive operations beyond its borders. All this means a virtual assembly line of new generations of aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, fighter aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles and associated systems. In all this, space is a key element for C4ISR—command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveilla­nce and reconnaissance. We are talking here not of individual satellites, but constellations. So by 2020, the existing 30 Beidou navigation satellites will be replaced by 35 advanced versions. Already 40 Yaogan satellites move in a triplet formation providing ima­gery and electronic intelligence. By 2020, China will be able to obtain 30-minute updates from any part of the globe from 60 satellites including the Gaofen and Jilin series. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is also working on counter-space systems aimed at knocking out adversary satellites.

For years, the PLA used to talk about “informationised warfare” which was about digital systems and networks. Now, they are on the threshold of what analyst Elsa Kania says is the era of “intelligentised warfare” featuring artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing to enhance their C4ISR capabilities. The depth of the Chinese effort is obvious: many of the technologies now emerging are part of an effort undertaken under Project 863, begun in March 1986. Among these are boost glide vehicles, laser and high-power microwave (HPM) weapons. Earlier this year, young scientist Huang Wenhua received a nati­onal technology award for developing an HPM system for defending warships from anti-ship missiles.
Beyond the horizon is an array of even more drama­tic AI-based technologies, where China has emerged as a global leader—in quantum computing and communications and electromagnetic and pulsar propulsion in space. These have great military consequences, and in all of them, China has demonstrated a capacity, such as the launch last August of the world’s first quantum communications satellite Micius.
 But in the past few years, the challenge we have faced from China has been somewhat strange. There has been Pakistan, the “iron brother” that can always be counted on to keep India off balance, but we have also seen a handful of Chinese soldiers pitching a tent in the middle of nowhere in Aksai Chin in 2013, a disembodied voice warning INS Airavat in 2011 that it was in Chinese waters, when, in fact, it was in Vietnam’s EEZ, or, more recently, the invocation of a non-binding UN Resolution 1172 of 1998 demanding that India end the development of ballistic missiles, and the decision to rename six places in Arunachal Pradesh. This is a new kind of warfare involving psychological, legal and media elements. With both countries possessing nuclear weapons, it is unlikely that they will openly fight each other. But, warfare has many dimensions and the best victory is one that is obtained without fighting at all.
 Indeed, as Wu Chunqiu of the Academy of Military Sciences argued in 2000, “Victory without war does not mean that there is no war at all. The wars one must fight are political wars, economic wars, science and technology wars, diplomatic wars, etc. To sum up in a word, it is a war of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). Although military power is an important factor, in peacetime it usually acts as a backup force, and plays the role of invisible might.” What India must understand is that war is no longer about tanks and guns, but CNP. China has long had a fascination with the concept pioneered by Ray Cline of the CIA, who came up with an index based on the formula Pp = (C+E+M) x (S+W) in the 1960s. In the nuclear age, defeat and victory were about CNP, as the erstwhile Soviet Union realised, not its military arsenal.

 In Cline’s schema, Pp was perceived power, C was critical mass (population plus territory), E was economic capability, M stood for military strength, S was strategic purpose and W the will to pursue national strategy. Subsequently other indices came up, using even more refined variables.

The Chinese have never hidden their will to power. Where India has always wanted to be seen as a ‘Great Nation’, the Chinese are clear that they are once again destined to be a, if not the, ‘Great Power’. To that end, they are deploying a range of elements relating to hard and soft power, and the $1 trillion One Belt One Road scheme is its economic manifestation.
One of the key areas being pursued is STI—science, technology and innovation. In the next five years, the Chinese government alone will spend $250 billion in S&T and innovation. Its tech giants, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and others will spend several times this sum. The priority areas are quantum communications and computation, an arcane field that is difficult to even conceptualise, but whose implications are earth-shaking. In addition, focus remains on cyber security, deep-space exploration, robotics, materials, genetics, big data and brain research.

Hard power is used to control or coerce the behaviour of others, but equally vital are soft power, persuasion, leading by example and a sense of legitimacy.  Here authoritarian China does not have it easy, but it isn’t conceding anything. It is spending billions in winning friends and influencing people. Through institutions and schemes like the AIIB, NDB and the OBOR, it is expanding its remit to include Asia, parts of Europe and the Indian Ocean Region. Its media and culture outreach aims to present China in the best possible way to the international community.
The Chinese challenge is not about guns and submarines, though the disputed border and the Sino-Pak nexus signify the need to up our guard. It is about CNP, of which the military is an important element, but not the only one. We need a compound national strategic effort to enhance all the CNP elements. In the first stage, India needs to und­erstand that it is no longer competing with China, but seeking to cope with an increasing asymmetry of power. It should turn the Chinese strategy inside out by ringing itself with A2/AD defences and make up our military power deficit through effective coalitions and alliances.

It means a society working at a much higher level of efficiency than the one we have now. It means a different kind of a military, not the World War II kind of force we have today. But more important, we need a socially cohesive India, led by people with a constructive and forward-looking agenda. Most important, we need to understand that there are no shortcuts. What you see in China is what began 30 years ago.
Outlook May 15, 2017

Retaliating Is One Thing, Deterring Cross-Border Attacks From Pakistan is Another

If only some way could be found to target the BATs specifically, then some kind of a deterrent pressure could be built. As of now, the poor jawans who get killed are merely collateral damage.

 

There is a farcical debate going on about how India should deal with Pakistan on the beheading episode. Amarinder Singh, the chief minister of Punjab, wants three heads. Ramdev, the yoga entrepreneur, wants 10.
The government is silent, though army chief Bipin Rawat has hinted at retaliation, saying that the army does not disclose its future plans, but that he will share the details after the execution of the Indian response.
There is one problem. That the Indian jawans were beheaded is known to the Indian authorities; presumably they have retained the photographic evidence, since the personnel were cremated in sealed caskets. The external affairs ministry’s spokesman Gopal Baglay said on Wednesday (May 3) that India had “actionable evidence,” which was the blood sample of the slain personnel and the trail of their blood going to the Pakistan side of the LoC.
Pakistan is predictably silent for the simple reason it knows that to even acknowledge what their so-called Border Action Teams (BAT) have done would be tantamount to a war crime. So, as far as they are concerned, they will claim that non-state actors – call them Kashmiri “freedom fighters” if you will – perpetrated the act, though it is well known that they got their covering fire from Pakistani army posts.
This is what poses a dilemma for the Indian side. To go and lop off 10 heads and then declare that you have done it would immediately bring the charge of committing a war crime on the Indian army. Considering its generally good record, it would be a blemish that will not go away easily.
Now it is not that Indian soldiers have not lopped off heads before, but they were done in covert operations that no one talked about. At the same time, the message was received by the people who were meant to receive it. Now, however, with the government tacitly encouraging the media to raise the demand for revenge to a fever pitch, it will not be enough if the army, say, a fortnight from now, simply issues a press statement saying that it has avenged the attack.
All that the Pakistani side will do is to simply claim that nothing has happened. That is what they did in the case of the ‘surgical strike’ that the Indian side announced. Even now, that strike is only an Indian claim, there is no collateral evidence, either from Pakistan or from the UN Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan, which at least nominally monitors the border.
The bigger problem is that we do not know what it takes to deter such attacks on Indian troops. While the attacks are carried out by the Pakistani BATs – and any retaliation by the equally tough Indian Special Forces – the victims are ordinary soldiers on the LoC, either through ambushes or silent attacks. If only some way could be found to target the BATs specifically, then some kind of a deterrent pressure could be built. As of now, the poor jawans who get killed are merely collateral damage.
We do not even know what triggered the recent event. There is little doubt that it was a carefully staged operation directed by the Pakistan army. Maybe it was in retaliation for something our forces had done, or aimed at raising India-Pakistan temperatures further by forcing India to react. Perhaps it is linked to the possibility of an India-Pakistan meet at the sidelines of the SCO summit in July, speculation for which is rife ever since the visit to Muree of the Indian businessman Sajjan Jindal, who is said to enjoy the confidence of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif. If it is the first, silence would have been a better option, and if it is the second, we need to remember the American adage – revenge is a dish best served cold.
If the goal of the assault and beheading was to derail an India-Pakistan détente, surely by now we ought to have learnt how to handle the Pakistani deep state which resorts to a provocation whenever there is a talk of peace between India and Pakistan.
This is a bizarre situation where India and Pakistan are being pushed to fight a war literally at two ends of the spectrum. At one end are ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and at the other are knives and fists. The middle ground of a good old-fashioned war with guns and tanks, which the two armies are raring to fight, seems to have become obsolete. The fist and knife war can go on indefinitely since it is not destructive enough. On the other extreme is the nuclear option after which there’ll be no one left to knife.
What is happening on the LoC is, as we noted, a farcical affair because all it is doing, as far as India is concerned, is to provide grist to the pseudo-nationalist mill. Instead of focusing on much more important tasks in nation building, it is feeding people on a diet of heightened and negative emotions, amplified by the TV channels.

The American novelist Norman Mailer once proposed, apropos the American belief that the Vietnam war was really a proxy war with the Chinese, that the two sides resolve the matter by both the US and China selecting their best army division and having them fight it out, face to face in the Brazilian jungle. Whoever won would be declared the winner of the larger war that was going on in Vietnam. In other words, if primal instincts needed to be assuaged, let it be done in the truly primeval style where combat was often ritualised.
The Wire May 6, 2017

Why it's dangerous for BJP government to assume it can resolve Kashmir crisis

The clearest indication that things on the ground are regressing in Jammu and Kashmir is the massive Cordon and Search Operation (CASO) launched in Shopian, the southern part of the Valley last week.
At the beginning of the militancy, such door-to-door operations were the norm, they were wasteful in terms of manpower and they obtained indifferent results. But there was little alternative to them since the J&K Police had melted down and local intelligence had dried up.

Square one
Subsequently, when the BSF G-Branch had developed a network of informants from turning captured militants, and the J&K Police had revived, such sweeps were wound up and instead, the security forces, often led by the state police’s Special Operations Group, resorted to intelligence-led operations that cause little collateral damage and virtually decimated the militant network in the Valley.

Army personnel during a search operation in Shopian district of Kashmir. (PTI) 
So, the indications are, that, at least in the southern part of the Valley, things are back to square one. Reports suggest that the local police has again melted and no local intelligence is coming through, and hence the massive brigade-level sweep. Just how retro things are, is evident from a comment by a retired general that maybe the time had come to once again use turned militants, Ikhwanis, to hunt down militants.
In these past weeks and months, for the first time in a long while, we have had international leaders saying that, maybe, there was need for mediation between India and Pakistan on Jammu and Kashmir.
First it was our own Nikki Haley who said that the Trump administration could play a role in de-escalating the India-Pakistan situation, then came Turkish President Erdogan who in a interview on the eve of his visit to New Delhi, called for “a multilateral dialogue” to settle the Kashmir issue. Now, we have even had a Global Times commentary noting that China “has a vested interest in helping resolve regional conflicts including the dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan. “
Many Indians don’t realise that for the world community, J&K is not a closed chapter. It is just that, based on the India-Pakistan dialogues, the world community has felt that perhaps, it was best left to the two to sort out the problem. But if there is a feeling that there is no dialogue and things are escalating, then there will certainly be need for third–party intervention.
Skewed perception
All these years, despite continuous Pakistani interference, the J-K issue was slowly moving towards resolution. Militancy was declining and even Pakistan was signaling that, maybe, it could accept a compromise in which current borders would not change.
The big problem that we have today is that the BJP-led government has different ideas. It actually believes it can resolve the issue once and for all — liberate Pakistan occupied Kashmir, in particular Gilgit Baltistan, and bludgeon the dissidents in the Valley into submission.This is, if anything, a perfect example of hubris.





New Delhi believes that the factors responsible for the violence and tension in the Valley are entirely external. And there is little to be gained through internal dialogue. This is a skewed understanding of the situation. Pakistan is certainly responsible for pumping in men and money into the Valley, but they are able to get shelter and function because India has not been able to convince the locals that it has their welfare in its heart.

Flexible tactics
Last week, the key BJP interlocutor, speaking behind the screen of anonymity, ruled out all dialogue till the stone-pelting continued in the Valley. Referring indirectly to some comments by former NSA MK Narayanan and former RAW chief AS Dulat, he declared that they had “had enough time and opportunity to implement their ideas… Now it is our turn to get things in order. Let us handle the issue in the way we want.”
So the world, and the people of this country, must accept a strategy where the government deliberately allows the health of Jammu and Kashmir to deteriorate, claiming that this will effect a complete cure at the end. If this sounds like a quack cure, it probably is.
Past governments had a more modest approach, believing that all they could do was to manage the issue, not resolve it in the short term. To that end, they adopted multiple, but flexible tactics — talks with Pakistan, roundtables in the Valley, behind-the-scene dialogue with the separatists and so on.
This led to a slow and steady improvement of the conditions in the Valley. The search for the perfect solution is illusory, the best as is well known, is often the enemy of the good.
 Mail Today May 8, 2017

Wrong diagnosis: Rhetorical arrows cannot dispel hard questions about government ineptitude in Sukma massacre

When you mis-categorise a phenomenon or mislabel an event, you are liable to err in dealing with it. This can have serious consequences, just as faulty diagnosis leads to a worsening of a disease.
And so it is with the Maoist insurgency in central India.In the minds of the Modi government, the Maoists appear to be nothing but terrorists who are wont to make “cowardly attacks” on our security forces who were, in this most recent instance, killed in a “cold blooded manner”. A senior minister weighed in against human rights activists for their silence on the killings.
Now, from all accounts, the CRPF party was expertly ambushed by a group of Maoists and the 25 personnel killed presumably died fighting, gun in hand. This was an unfortunate development, tragic, even disastrous. But it can hardly be termed either cold-blooded or cowardly. As for human rights, the traditional use of the term relates to atrocities against non-combatants, including disarmed security personnel.



Perhaps the government had hoped that through its rhetorical arrows, howsoever misdirected, it would quell the hard questions about its own conduct. Why had it failed to appoint a person to head the CRPF for the past two months (one has now been appointed on Wednesday)? Why are poorly trained and led CRPF personnel being asked to take up such a dangerous counterinsurgency duty?
Mao Zedong once said that you should respect your enemy tactically, even while despising him strategically. So, even as we reject the Maoist ideology and seek to destroy it tooth and nail, we should have a healthy regard for Maoist guerrillas’ abilities as fighters. Only if we do so will we be able to defeat them.
The Maoist challenge is not a new one. Police have been combating them in various ways and locales since the mid-1960s. It has soundly defeated them in Bengal and the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh and there is need to learn from those experiences in taking on the latest version of Maoists in central India’s jungles.
The key to the defeat was a combination of political action and intelligenceled military operations. Clearly, in the case of Chhattisgarh what we are witnessing is an incoherent application of military force, sans any intelligence. This was evident in the terrible 2010 ambush in Dantewada when CRPF lost 76 jawans, and a year later when 26 died in Narayanpur. Then, as now, CRPF had zero intelligence about large Maoist forces in its vicinity.
Such intelligence can be obtained through technical means ­ UAVs, foliage penetrating radars and so on. But it is best gathered through the patient use of human sources.
The forces you employ must be highly skilled in jungle warfare as the Greyhounds of Andhra are, or the army in the northeast. But more than that you need effective political messaging through which you challenge the Maoist narrative that the people are being exploited and their rights violated by the Indian state. This does not mean a speech in New Delhi or a declaration in Raipur, but action on the ground. The people must be made to feel that the government cares for them and is doing its best to resolve their problems.
In that sense the Raman Singh government is the biggest failure. He has led the state for nearly 15 years, has done little or nothing to undermine the Maoist challenge and is leaving the issue to be resolved through exclusively military means.
The use of force to resolve a problem is very seductive, but it is also extremely destructive. Now we seem to be seeing this wrong-diagnosis-worsening-thedisease phenomenon in Jammu & Kashmir as well where the government has decided that all dissenters are terrorists who must be dealt with as such. As a result, the political health of the state has taken a turn for the worse.
Times of India April 29, 2017

India's autocratic streak of democracy

Last week in a conversation triggered by Yogi Adityanath's style of governance by fiat, a colleague argued that India cannot function with the liberal democratic system. It needs a dose of authoritarian rule to transform itself. 

There is little doubt that if the country were to hold a referendum today, the result would favour those who will accept curbs on freedom of our precious freedoms of speech and action as a necessary sacrifice for economic growth. 

There is one problem with this model. Prime Minister Naerndra Modi, and now, the Yogi, may be paragons among leaders - honest, deeply committed to the nation and enormously hard-working. 

But they are neither gods nor supermen. They cannot themselves administer every department they oversee, nor ensure that there are excesses committed in the name of the policies they advocate. 

Nationalism 

Implementing Modi or Yogi's stern pronouncements depend on a capable bureaucracy or a dedicated party organisation. 

 

 

Yogi and Modi cannot themselves administer every department they oversee, nor ensure that there are excesses committed in the name of the policies they advocate.

There are two ways to achieve that goal - one is to have a governmental system populated with people with their own qualities down the line from the secretariats to city municipalities and village panchayats. 

But, the Indian bureaucratic culture until now has been associated with inefficiency, corruption and lassitude. It can change, but only slowly and over a period of time. 

The other option is to rely on party cadre. In that sense the BJP government is well endowed. The party and its mentor organisation, the RSS are a cadre-based outfits with committed and dedicated personnel. 

Whether they intend to, or can provide, expertise in building a modern state is another matter. What seems to drive them is cultural nationalism - gau raksha, vegetarianism, re-writing history text books, promoting traditional medicine and so on. 

The big problem with authoritarian systems of the type that my colleague envisages is that they choke off feedback loops. It is possible to use all kinds of mechanisms like town hall meetings and the social media to know what the public is thinking. 

But over time, it's clear, this simply doesn't work resulting in explosive revolts leading to a great deal of death, disruption and destruction. 

Perhaps the best example of a contemporary authoritarian system is China. The Communist Party of China, currently some 121 million strong, runs everything there, the state, every school, university, municipality, all the big industry, indeed, even the Chinese military is actually an arm of the Party, rather than Chinese state. 

So, the best and the brightest, if they want to flourish, must become part of the party system. 

This system has achieved a great deal - it has transformed China from a poor Third World Country into one which is seeking to emerge as the pre-eminent world power. 

But in the process, it has also committed great crimes, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people. 

Legitimacy 

Under Xi Jinping, the CPC is seeking to reinvent itself as the party that will lead to China's rejuvenation as the world's foremost power. But it is acutely aware of the fact that it sits atop a vast corrupt system where there is little justice for the average person. 

He/she cannot move across China and settle down where they will, they cannot get justice because the party is the prosecutor and judge and its functioning opaque. 

It walls off China's internet and strictly controls the flow of ideas in the educational system and media. 

History shows that as countries like Japan, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Greece, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore transited from the middle-income to high-income levels in the 1960s and 1970s, they also shed authoritarian rule and became democracies. 

Middle income China confronts this dilemma today. The CPC may not acknowledge it openly, but it faces a crisis of legitimacy. Having achieved middle-class status, people also want a say in their own governance and liberty of thought and action. 

Besides, there are the intangibles that democracy delivers in terms of its cultural eco-system where entrepreneurship and innovation flourish. 

India, of course, is an exception being poor and a democracy, though it is, as historian Ramchandra Guha says, an 'election-only' democracy.

Stability 

India, of course, is an exception being poor and a democracy, though it is, as historian Ramchandra Guha says, an 'election-only' democracy. So does it require a dose of authoritarian rule to transit to a middle-income economy? 

Many in India would argue that it does. The Modis and Yogis are looked up to because they have an authoritarian streak, but their problem is that they do not have the large numbers of administrators and managers who can get this system to work at higher levels of efficiency. 

On the other hand, they have a large team of raucous cadre who are undermining the already fragile social stability and rule of law in the country. 

Mail Today, 23 April 2017

Why Is China Renaming Seemingly Unimportant Places in Arunachal Pradesh?

Two of the six spots renamed could be of significance, but the other four are simply points on a map. Is there a method behind this that we cannot discern at the moment?

 

Earlier this month China’s ministry of civil affairs, responsible for social and administrative affairs under its government, published a notification changing the names of six places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China has claimed since the 1950s and now says is South Tibet. According to the state-owned daily Global Times, this is a “move to reaffirm the country’s territorial sovereignty to the disputed region.” But there is little doubt that the step is a deliberate move aimed at punishing India for permitting the Dalai Lama to visit the Tawang monastery earlier in April.
China’s renaming places is part of what is called lawfare, where countries seek to get the legal high ground to press their claims. This is not a new feature for the Sino-Indian relationship. For instance, when China wanted to press a claim to Barahoti Pass in Garhwal, it renamed it as Wu Je. Likewise, Demchok, which is in Ladakh and claimed by China, was named Parigas. Similar examples abound in cases where China or other countries dispute territory. We are familiar with the Argentinian designation of Falklands Islands as the Malvinas, or the differing names used by the Vietnamese and Chinese for the Paracel and Spratly Islands.

The notification on renaming of six places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet.

Along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), where Indian and Chinese claims overlap, the naming and renaming is accompanied by another manifestation of the game – leaving behind tell-tale signs. Chinese patrols enter areas within the Indian claim line and leave behind newspapers, cigarette packets, old uniforms and so on. Often they paint rocks declaring it to be Chinese territory. Indian patrols do the same and whenever they come across Chinese tell-tale signs, they deface them and carry away or destroy the litter.
The Chinese ministry published its notification of April 13 giving the names in the Chinese, Tibetan and English scripts along with the latitude and longitude of the places. However, they did not indicate the original names of the places.
Plotting the Chinese given latitude and longitudes onto Google Earth results in a fascinating revelation – while two of the spots could be of significance, the other four are simply points on a map with no habitation and no prominent landmark. One would imagine that they are totally random, but perhaps, since this is just the first of many similar exercises, there is a method that we cannot discern at this stage.
Plotting “Wo’gyainling” (91° 52’ 25”E and 27°34’54”N) on Google Earth reveals a nondescript locality in Tawang 1.70 km from the monastery as the crow flies. However, some 300 metres away is the small but elegant Urgelling Gompa. Now there are scores of gompas all over the area, but the significance of Urgelling is that it is the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama.
“Mila Ri” (93° 52’ 25”E and 28° 03’ 06”N) – “ri” means mountain in Tibetan – is not even the highest point on a forested mountain slope. “Qoidengarbo Ri” (93° 45’ 57”E and 28°16’ 50”N) is clearly a peak, though its significance is not known to this writer. Maybe, it and Mila Ri are places of local religious significance.
“Mainquka” (94° 08’ 04”E  and 28° 36’ 03”N ), or Menchuka as it is now known, seems to be just about the only place of significance renamed. It is a town with an airstrip just about 30 km from the LAC.
“Bumo La” (96° 46’ 25”E and 28°06’ 55”N) was initially assumed to the Bum La (27°43’ 31”N and 91° 53′ 32″E), the pass north of Tawang where India and China have their routine military-to-military meetings. But the coordinates provided land you up at the eastern extremity of Arunachal Pradesh, some 24 km west of Walong, while Bum La is on the western extremity. Further, Bumo La does not appear to be a pass, as the suffix “La” would suggest; it is merely a point on the slope of a mountain.
“Namkapub Ri” (95° 06’ 05”E and 28° 12’ 49”N) is the big mystery. There was an assumption that this could be the Namka Chu ( 91° 40’ 40”E and 27° 49’ 18”N), which is in the western extremity of the Sino-Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh. This was the site of the first attack by China in 1962. But the coordinates provided by the China’s civilian affairs ministry lands you on a forested slope where there are no distinct geographical features like a river, a mountain peak, pass or a dwelling of any kind.
The Wire April 24, 2017