I read an article by James Lamont in FT today which is quite disturbing to say the least. It made me ask myself if something has really gone wrong with India in governing the entire North East and Arunachal Pradesh mention of which comes in the national news seldom and always for the wrong reasons. As I have been to these places a number of times I thought why not share it with you.
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Indians living in border areas neighbouring China are beginning to envy fast-paced development brought by Beijing to the point of regretting being Indian, a senior member of India's ruling Congress party has warned.
Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former senior diplomat and cabinet minister with responsibility for India’s volatile northeast region, described the development that China was bringing to its southwest and Tibet as “simply spectacular”.
He said impoverished local people in India's northeast were asking themselves: “What is the mistake we have made by being Indians rather than Chinese?” He also warned of the consequences of families divided by the colonial era border "beginning to hear stories about the kind of progress happening on the other [Chinese] side”.
India is highly sensitive about Chinese encroachment on its borders. China and India fought a war in 1962 over disputed border territory, and China has in the past year become more strident about its claims to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh which it considers to be South Tibet.
The friction has manifested itself in disputes over Chinese visas for residents of Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir, obstacles to multilateral lending programmes and a protest by Beijing over prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh ahead of a state election.
Mr Singh shared some of his concerns with the US Council on Foreign Relations in November, saying he feared that China had become more “assertive” in the region.
China’s aims in south Asia have continued to be a sore point in the new year. SM Krishna, India’s foreign minister, over the weekend expressed New Delhi’s unhappiness about China’s assistance to neighbouring Pakistan and called Beijing-backed projects on the Pakistan side of the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir “illegal”.
Some senior Indian analysts claim that India has deliberately withheld infrastructure development from its border regions to prevent China being able to penetrate deeply into India in case of an invasion across the Himalayas.
But Mr Aiyar, a close associate of slain premier Rajiv Gandhi, criticised successive Indian governments for the “complete neglect of infrastructure development” in Arunachal Pradesh, saying that its absence was “much to the disappointment of the people over there”.
Over the past six decades, he said, the northeast had been "transformed from the second richest part of British India to the laggard region it is today”.
Indian visitors to Tibet are struck by the modernisation that has taken place in Lhasa, the region’s capital, road building projects and a high-altitude railway link to China’s main network. This is in spite of their reservations about Beijing’s erosion of Tibetan culture and Buddhist religious practice.
A member of parliament from India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya, however, said China made itself felt across the border not with its physical infrastructure or military might but by a flood of highly competitive consumer goods. He said cheap Chinese goods were freely available; imported telephone accessories were being sold at a tenth of their Indian equivalents.
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